


Found the Heart of a Lion (in the Belly of the Beast)

by last_illusions (injured_eternity)



Series: Fractured Moonlight on the Sea [1]
Category: Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Afghanistan, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety Attacks, Arc Reactor, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Characters of Colour, Doctor Who References, F/M, Gen, Headcanon, M/M, MCU & 616 got stuck in a blender, MIT Era, Mentions of Verbal Abuse & Neglect, Origin Story, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-MCU, Rhodey Is a Good Bro, STEM, Sassy!Steve, Snark, Team Dynamics, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark is a stubborn bastard, Tony Stark tends to almost die a lot, Tony Stark-centric, Torture, gratuitous mythology references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 16:54:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2236452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/injured_eternity/pseuds/last_illusions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1999, Tony Stark is twenty-eight and cocky, and it’s entirely possible he’s been drunk for the better part of the last thirteen years.  “I’ll see you up on the roof in five minutes,” he says to a man whose name he doesn’t bother remembering.  It’s a promise he has no intention of keeping, and he’s never had patience for overweening fans.</p><p>Talk about things coming back to bite you in the arse.<br/> </p><p>Or: The Iron Man Origin Story, in which Tony Stark builds himself some friends and trips over a family.</p><p>Spans from Tony's childhood through to 2013.  Designed to be read comprehensibly as a standalone, or within the series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Found the Heart of a Lion (in the Belly of the Beast)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WildAndFreeHearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildAndFreeHearts/gifts).
  * Inspired by [[Video] Borne on Wings of Steel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2238615) by [WildAndFreeHearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildAndFreeHearts/pseuds/WildAndFreeHearts). 



> Spoilers for all three _Iron Man_ films, _Captain America_ , and _The Avengers_ \--and, in a very sideways manner, _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_. Also _Agents of SHIELD_ , as far as Coulson's survival goes, but at this point I think everybody in the known world has figured that one out. Rating is mostly due to caution, between the narrative of Afghanistan and everything following, and language. It [unfortunately] has nothing to do with porn.
> 
> Thanks to [sirona](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sirona/pseuds/sirona) for hearing fragments of an outline, then brainstorming and convincing me to actually write it and place a claim in this challenge; thanks to [ethelindi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ethelindi/pseuds/ethelindi) for the beta; and thanks to sirona, ethelindi, and [CinnamonCake](http://archiveofourown.org/users/CinnamonCake) for the commiseration and cheerleading on All the Tony Feels. And, of course, thank you to my very, very patient artist for a fabulous foundation; I doubt this is what you were expecting, but I hope it serves all the same.
> 
> Title from Grace Potter & the Nocturnals’ “The Lion the Beast the Beat”. This is, by rules of the ARBB, written as a standalone piece; it is also a prequel of sorts to a novel-length WIP, hence the sensation of MCU and 616 having been thrown in a blender and set on high. It should be straightforward, but if you have questions, feel free to ask.
> 
> Otherwise, see the second “chapter” for notes pertaining to specific canon sources, exceptions to said canon, bits of scientific geekery, medical clarifications, and standard don’t-sue-me disclaimers. (If you read something that makes you go, “wait, what?” it’s probably in the notes.)

_Here I’ll live and die with my wings in the sky_  
_And I won’t come down no more_  
\--Kansas, “Icarus—Borne on Wings of Steel”

 _31 December 1999_ ; _Bern, Switzerland_

In 1999, Tony Stark is twenty-eight and cocky, and it’s entirely possible he’s been drunk for the better part of the last thirteen years.  “I’ll see you up on the roof in five minutes,” he says to a man whose name he doesn’t bother remembering.  It’s a promise he has no intention of keeping, and he’s never had patience for overweening fans.

On New Year’s Day, he rolls out of a stranger’s bed, recalls the name of her project even if he isn’t certain of hers.  He solves the missing component of _Extremis_ while thoroughly hungover, if not actually still drunk, scrawls a message he’s written a thousand times before, and walks out of her room looking perfectly sober.  The burnt, blackened walls and incongruently healthy ficus plant barely register.

Talk about things coming back to bite you in the arse.

\----------

Arguably, this is the story of his life.  “That’s all you got?  A cheap trick and a cheesy one-liner?” a woman will ask him years later while trying to kill him.  As if to prove the universe has a skewed sense of gallows humour, they’re standing amidst the detritus that is the result of his calculations in that Swiss hotel room.

“Sweetheart,” he’ll respond, “that could be the name of my autobiography.”  The level of snark, he’ll learn, is about directly proportionate to the number of attempts on one’s life.  It shouldn’t be something you get used to, but he’s Tony Stark: he’ll keep poking the bear with a stick even when it’s actively eating him.

And, purely out of spite, if he ever has _time_ to write his autobiography (which is to say, dictate it to JARVIS), that really _will_ be the title.

Psychologists—both the kind who know what they’re doing and the kind who make you want to dump them out their office window—will tell you exactly how much your life is shaped by your parents, in case you couldn’t figure that out for yourself.  There’s the obvious: he builds his first circuit board at age four, his first engine at six, and so on.  Then there’s the less obvious, where shrinks and doctors start throwing around phrases like “neglect” and “emotional abuse” and he does the cognitive equivalent of clapping his hands over his ears and singing loudly off-key.

His achievements are valuable to Howard insofar as they provide Stark Industries—then, later, Stark International—with good PR, the son as the image of his father, putting the company in good hands when the time comes.  When out of the public eye, he’s simply underfoot, Howard shouting for his wife to come collect their son more often than he ever pays attention to the things Tony builds.

“Son, your school tests may prove you’re a genius, but you act like an idiot!” Howard tells him one day when he’s home from boarding school, sharp hand gestures putting the scotch in his tumbler at risk of decorating the floor.

It’s always been difficult to determine how much of what Howard says is influenced by alcohol and how much is sincere, but when you’re all of eight years old the distinction is irrelevant.  It’s just a father’s glaring disappointment against a son’s inability to please, a spectre taunting him in the back of his mind for the rest of his life.

When she’s there, Maria does what Howard should: she listens, praises him, lets him tell her everything he possibly can about the invention in his hands.  It’s from Maria that he gets his love of books, why Tony keeps a library in almost every residence under his name despite his comparable love of technology.  Maria is warmth, soft hands, comfort, gentle embraces.  Maria is also absence, spending as much time away from her husband as public decency allows. If the compromise is leaving her son in the care of the family butler, so be it.

So, when he has an AI in development years later and is ready to test it, he’s already been calling it JARVIS in his head, though he resolutely denies having made up a ridiculous acronym just to honour Edwin Jarvis.  Because it was Jarvis who all but raised him, pushed him to do his schoolwork (however boring), asked questions about his creations and his robots and listened to the answers, who bandaged scrapes and bruises and did his best to stand like a bastion between young Tony Stark and the rest of the world.  “Sheltered” would never apply to the son of Howard Stark, but for reasons Tony would never comprehend, Edwin Jarvis had been unaccountably fond of him and done everything in his power to allow him moments of his childhood.

\----------

When he’s three, he meets Peggy Jones, née Carter, and it isn’t until long years later that he comes to understand the extent of her involvement in SHIELD.  Right then, she’s simply Aunt Peggy, the woman who listens just as Jarvis does, who’s proud of him simply for _being_  in the way his parents should be but aren’t.  The passing years have treated her well: there’s grey threading through her rich mahogany hair that she doesn’t try to hide, laugh lines worn into place around her mouth and still-bright blue eyes, but she’s sharp as ever and could still dump a man on his arse before he knew what happened.

She sits with him discussing blueprints of a calibre more suited to university students than a toddler, talks _with_  him instead of down _to_  him.  More importantly, in his mind, she understands.  She tells him stories of the war, of Captain America; and unlike Howard, when she talks about the American Hero, she’s talking about the man behind the mask as much as the soldier and the icon.

When he’s a little older, she tells him exactly what she lost when Steve Rogers downed his own plane in the English Channel.  “He would have liked you,” she says with a soft, fond smile.  Enough time has passed for the memories to be warm, reassuring, removed of the sharp pain that accompanies unexpected loss, and she adds, “He’d have been entirely confounded by you, but he’d have liked you all the same.”

Thirty years later, he considers calling her bluff—he knows where she is, had offered for her to stay with him or at any of the properties he owned.  “Tch,” she’d scoffed.  “You, my dear, do not need an old woman underfoot.”  She would brook no argument whatsoever, so he compromises by stopping by to see her as often as he can.  If he also makes regular donations to her nursing home, she never needs to know.

The first time he sees her after Manhattan—SHIELD co-founder she may have been, but retirement screws with your security clearance, so he hasn’t told her Steve Rogers is alive—he can’t bring himself to tell her how close they’d come to blows, how likely it is that they _would_  have if Clint Barton hadn’t blown up half the Helicarrier when he did.

What he says instead is, “He’s just like you said,” and it isn’t a lie, either.  They’re hardly best friends, but they’d made their peace after the battle was over; fighting shoulder-to-shoulder and flying off on a suicide mission will do that, funny enough.  “I haven't told him you’re here,” he adds.  “I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”

She smiles at him, squeezes his hand.  “If he asks,” she suggests, and he nods.

\----------

 _September 1986 - May 1989_ ; _Cambridge, Massachusetts_

The sheer speed at which his brain works means he’s never allowed to stop thinking, and dual majors in physics and engineering at MIT are easier than they logically should be, even for a child prodigy with beyond-genius-level IQ.  It takes all of two years before he graduates _summa cum laude_  at age seventeen, Master’s degrees in both subjects following within another year; Maria and Howard miss both graduation ceremonies.  The press line is that they’re “out of the country on business and are extremely proud of their son's accomplishments”.  (Tony knows better, though technically speaking Maria _is_ out of the country, albeit for different reasons.) It’s Jarvis and Peggy who end up sitting where the other graduates have parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, but they’re every bit as proud as the blood family in attendance for Tony’s classmates.

Somewhere in his undergraduate career he builds DUM-E, a prototype AI he knows isn’t what he was aiming for—to be fair, he wrote most of the schematics and the coding while drunk, drugged, or both—but he can’t bring himself to scrap it.  U comes next, along with Butterfingers, slightly more sophisticated; all three exceed the attempts he’d made as a child.  It never occurs to him that he’s done what people tease other children about: he’s built his own friends.  And if the hope still persists in the back of his head that enough innovation would get Howard’s attention, his approval, he shoves it viciously into a box labelled “do not open; high-grade explosives” and sweeps it aside into his subconscious the way you’d sweep dust under a rug.

“I’ve applied to the PhD program here,” he tells Jarvis when the older man comes up to visit him at his Cambridge townhouse the year he finishes his Masters’ programs.

“And I assume you tell me this because you intend to go.”  It’s a statement, not a question, but Tony nods anyway.

“Looks like I’ll be here for a few more years.  You know as well as I do there’s no point in going back to New York,” he says flatly.  He’s spent his time since he got to uni trying to shut his brain up with work and, when that fails, meaningless sex with a side of alcohol and whatever substances he can find.  He knows Jarvis knows, knows he disapproves; that he’s only brought it up once speaks volumes on subjects Tony would rather not touch with a ten-foot pole and a Level A hazmat suit.

Jarvis—surrogate father figure, friend, confidant—looks at him over the cherrywood table and says nothing, drops a hand on his shoulder.  “You are missed,” he offers gently.  Tony can count on one hand the number of times the other man has used his given name, but at least he’s mostly stopped with the “Master Stark” and the “sir”.

Corners of his mouth quirking up in a small, sad smile bereft of the insolent bravado he’s worn like armour since he was seven, Tony reaches up and squeezes Jarvis’ hand.  “I know,” he answers, and they both know it’s not Howard or Maria under discussion, that Tony misses Jarvis’ constant, steady presence even though he’ll rarely say it aloud.

“Your friend James—he is off to the Air Force?”

Smile widening, Tony nods, pride in his voice as he answers, “He got tapped for OTS pretty much immediately out of Basic.”

“I am unsurprised; he will make a good commander.”

Jarvis, former Royal Canadian Air Force pilot himself, gets along frighteningly well with James Rhodes—Rhodey—who was one of those immediate, unlikely connections and became the closest thing Tony’s ever had to a best friend in the process.  Watching the two of them argue over the merits of their countries’ military and rules of engagement and aircraft and warfare is both highly entertaining and utterly terrifying, especially when someone remembers to point out that Jarvis is actually American.  Half the time Tony just sits back with a drink and lets them go at it; the rest of the time is about equally divided between getting distracted by an epiphany and considering selling tickets and serving popcorn.

But all he says is, “Yeah, he really will.”  A few decades later, he’ll be grateful he was right.

\----------

 _18 March 1987_ ; _Cambridge, Massachusetts_

“Tony.”

Halfway to the door of the lecture hall, he stops and turns, one foot still up on the next stair. “Professor.”

Motioning for him to head back down toward the worn oak podium, Shelley Keum turns back to gathering up her notes.  “Do you have a minute, or are you due for your next class?”

“No, I’m done for the day,” he replies.  It’s his second semester, and at the rate he’s going he’ll be done with both degrees in another year.  It means his course schedule is borderline insane, but even so it’s almost too easy. He makes his way down the carpeted stairs and tries to joke, “I didn’t miss a paper, did I?”

The Optics professor glances up at him and answers drily, “No, you even showed up to class.”

He’s not entirely certain whether or not she’s joking until the corners of her mouth twitch up. Unlike his Linear Algebra and Differential Equations Professor, who wouldn’t recognise a joke if it walked into the room dressed like a clown and threw a water balloon at her, Professor Keum manages to make a class about half composed of very bored second-years find optical engineering entertaining.

“It was a slow day,” he says, and she looks like she’s trying not to laugh.

Picking up her briefcase, she nods at the door.  “My office is the next building over.”  Because society had ingrained manners into him, he pulls the door open for her. “It’s late in the semester, I know,” she begins as they walk, “but are you currently doing any research work?”

“With my thermodynamics professor, yes.”  He shifts the leather strap of his bag higher on his shoulder.

Keying open the door of the Physics building, she waves him in ahead of her.  “I’m fairly sure I know the answer to this, but what’s your course load like at the moment?”

He mumbles something under his breath and she raises an eyebrow at him.  She’s one of the professors he actually _likes_ , so he repeats more clearly, “Eight classes.”  When she gives him that perfectly symmetrical, level expression that reminds him of nothing so much as Rhodey’s ROTC drill sergeant right before he hits the “drop and give me twenty, airman!” moment, he blows out a breath and admits, “Not counting the work with Professor Kappelhoff.”

“As I thought.” With a shake of her head, brown eyes amused, she says, “And let me guess: you still find you have spare time.”

He side-eyes her warily. “I plead the fifth.”

This time she _does_ laugh, sharp like it’s startled out of her.  “Inapplicable, Mr Stark; you are not on trial.”

 _Wait_ , he wants to say, _you have a law degree, too_? But he has _some_ measure of self-preservation, however small, so he keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t say anything at all.  Her office is on the first floor (or rather, ground floor, which with the layout of the building technically makes it the second floor; he gave up swearing at the architects a while ago), small mercies, so she unlocks her door and gestures at one of the vinyl chairs in front of her desk.  For lack of a better option, he takes it; it’s marginally less uncomfortable than he expected.

“I assume you didn’t decide to take time out of your day to ask me about my class schedule,” he offers as he scans the heavy oak bookshelves crammed against the walls, breaking the silence while she sets down her bag and sinks into her desk chair.

“You’d be correct,” she answers, and hands him a paper.

It takes him a beat after he accepts it to realise it’s one he wrote not ten days ago, and he looks up at her in confusion.  “I’d tell you I wrote this, except you graded it.”

Picking up a manila folder on her desk, she replies, entirely deadpan, “My TA did, actually, I have no idea what’s in that.”  Then she hands him the folder over the top of her desk and continues, “I’m currently working with David Fisher and Thorston Lucila in robotics, and given the calibre of that paper—”  She nods at the graded one still in his hand.  “—we wanted to bring you in as a collaborator.  Our lab is essentially us and a couple of undergrad research assistants, but even so, we’re aiming to get a paper out by the end of the year.”

“But, given the publication process,” he fills in for her, and she tips her head in acknowledgement, brushing back a strand of pitch black hair come loose from her braid.

“Precisely. So, knowing that, and given your current workload, would you be interested?”

He can feel his eyebrows try to merge with his hairline—“interested” would be an understatement on a good day.

He’s worked since he got to university, in a move driven by what some might be inclined to label pure bloody-mindedness.  It’s due at least in part to the assumption that he _won’t_ work if he doesn’t have to, which he resents as much as he understands.  He’s there on academic scholarship, having been courted by the top universities in the country (and a few outside of it) and offered every perk in the book, but he never ceases to feel guilty about it, given that his family is richer than god.  Or maybe Bill Gates, whatever.  The point is, he doesn’t pay tuition for his education, and that’s frankly embarrassing; so to compensate, he works and pays his own damn mortgage and utilities and everything else and lets the rest of the world believe Howard and Maria and his own college trust fund are covering it instead. It would, after all, look absolutely terrible if they made him fend for himself through school. Or so they say; he’s not actually sure why this matters to anyone else, so he takes some of the trust fund money he’s not using and quietly donates it to miscellaneous labs and departments to help fund equipment costs.

But even if all that were patently false, he’d still be a complete and utter moron to pass up an opportunity to be published as an undergrad, never mind work with a woman who studied under Stephen Hawking.

He takes exactly forty seconds to glance at the research summaries and data in the proffered folder, then looks up.  “It’d be my pleasure.”

“Excellent,” she replies, and holds out a hand.  He shakes it, firm and businesslike, and they go to work right then and there.

\----------

 _16 December 1992_ ; _Cambridge, Massachusetts_

Four years into a triple PhD that has professors and advisors and academic councils looking at him like he’s mental, Tony is twenty-one and has one year left instead of the customary three when he gets the phone call from New York.  He’s at home, in the basement he’d converted into a lab, and Obadiah Stane, his father’s business partner, is on the line to turn Tony’s world upside-down when he says, “Tony, I’m sorry.  Your parents were in a car accident this evening.  They—”  His voice catches, and years later Tony will wonder how much of that was an act, but in the moment he wants the cell towers to go out, for the country to be hit with a cascading power failure, anything that will keep Obie from finishing that sentence.  But if wishes were horses, he’d own Pegasus, and so Obie tells him, “They didn’t make it—the EMTs called it at the scene.”

He feels nothing and everything all at once, numbness and horror and desperation warring for precedence and succeeding only in flooding his brain with too much information.  “I’m heading back,” he manages to say like a coherent human being; then he’s moving on autopilot, grabbing keys and his wallet and not bothering to pack a bag.

When he opens the front door, Rhodey’s standing there with his hand poised to knock, almost hitting Tony in the nose when his face appears where the wood had been a moment ago. It’s about the same moment that Tony remembers Rhodey’s on leave this week and they had plans.  “What, were you—”  And whatever he'd been going to say dies on his lips as he takes in Tony’s face, because he’s got both hands on his friend’s shoulders, pushing him back into the foyer.  “What the hell happened?” he asks, dark eyes narrowed in concern.

Tony thinks he answers, until Rhodey repeats his question.  “My parents are dead,” is the only thing he can come up with despite trying to find some less blunt manner of delivery, and his friend blinks at him.

“Fuck, man, I’m so sorry.”

“I need to get back to New York, do… whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing,” he says, and Rhodey pulls the keys out of his hands.  “Hey, I—”

“Am in no state to drive,” the other man finishes for him with a firm finality.  “Come on.”

He doesn’t remember the drive, doesn’t remember if they stopped or just kept going.  He knows they hold nonsense conversations, knows it only because there’s no way Rhodey would drive for more than an hour without speaking, but to this day he hasn’t the faintest recollection of what they said.  He’s never asked; his friend never pushes the matter.

By the time they reach Manhattan, Obie’s made the funeral arrangements for the following day: when you’re as prominent a couple as the Starks, the city goes out of its way to make things move quickly.  Tony calls him to let him know he’s back, to ask if there’s anything more to be done, and Obie tells him everything’s taken care of and that he’ll see him in the morning.  Arguing takes energy and a presence of mind he doesn’t have, so he doesn’t try.

Unsurprisingly, Jarvis is waiting for them at Stark Mansion, where Rhodey parks in the drive and refuses to give the keys back.

“Master Stark, Lieutenant,” Jarvis says quietly, and leads them up the staircase.  Rhodey’s in one of the guest rooms, Tony in his usual quarters, and they both turn down the offer of a meal.

Before leaving Tony, Jarvis stops at the door.  “Do you need anything else, Master Stark?”

For the first time since Obie had called him, it is those words that are nearly his undoing, and Tony grips the edge of the dresser so tightly his knuckles turn white.  “Don’t,” he says.  “Please.”  Looking up, he finds Jarvis’ gaze and holds it.  “I am not my father,” he says, quieter than a whisper.

Expression never changing, Jarvis agrees, “No, you are not.”

When he says it, it doesn’t sound like an insult.

\----------

 _18 December 1992_ ; _Manhattan, New York_

The day of Howard and Maria Stark’s funeral, it rains.

In the cathedral, the minister’s voice echoes against marble and stone, lending a gravity to the sombre words of a Catholic sermon.  Tony sits in the front row as social custom dictates, accompanied by Obie and Peggy, with Rhodey and Jarvis standing on either side of him like some kind of buffer zone or flanking guard.  The church is nearly full, but the majority of those in attendance are business and society acquaintances.  Tony tries not to overthink that.

His eyes are dry, blank, and he goes through the motions with less animation than his robots. Following the communion, he gives the eulogy like a dutiful son, speaks to a crowd of people he barely knows about people he didn’t know much better.  Up until now, he’s never given much thought to mass, since the Church had never been high on the Stark family priority list, but as he steps away from the microphone he’s unutterably grateful that Catholic funerals limit eulogies to a few minutes.  Even that had felt like being caught in a black hole, time proceeding exponentially more slowly for him as he stood at the lectern.

As the pastor begins speaking the final commendation, there comes a slap-in-the-face realisation that his relationship with his parents is now at a standstill, frozen in time like a Salvador Dalí painting.  Ten days ago, he’d have said he held no expectations of ever changing their (Howard’s) opinions; today, the knowledge that any potential is gone is like a bucket of ice water to the face, so much more of a shock than he’d anticipated. Rhodey leans in, pressing their shoulders together for a moment in wordless support when he sits back down, and Tony would hug him if they weren’t in the middle of the damn ceremony.

Later, at the cemetery after the coffins have been lowered, the rain has turned into snow and he’s lost track of the number of essential strangers who have shaken his hand and offered their condolences.  They’ll do it again before the day is over, since people as high profile as Howard and Maria Stark can’t have a funeral that doesn’t include a wake.  He’s sent Obie back to the mansion for the guests while he finishes the niceties at the cemetery, and as the number of people dwindles to something approaching reasonable, he hears someone calling his name.

There’s only one woman there who’d be calling for him in a British accent, and he turns with the closest thing to a smile he’s managed all day.  “Aunt Peggy,” he says, and promptly finds himself wrapped in her arms and the faint scent of Givenchy’s _Amarige_.

They’d had time for little more than a nod and a hello at the church, and now she murmurs a soft “I’m so sorry” meant for his ears only.  There are so many layers to that apology that it would be funny if it weren’t his life.  “How are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” he answers frankly as he releases her, and she nods like that makes perfect sense.

Then again, given what she lost forty-six years ago, it probably does.

\----------

 _19 December 1992 - April 1994_ ; _Manhattan, New York_ ; _Cambridge, Massachusetts_

The day after the funeral, Tony and Obie sit down with his parents’ lawyers for the reading of the will. As their only son, the bulk of their assets fall unsurprisingly to Tony himself, though Howard has left both money and stock in Stark Industries to Obie.  Howard’s also siphoned off money to keep the search for Captain America up and running, and Tony doesn’t have the energy to figure out what he thinks about that.  What _is_ surprising is the announcement that Howard has also left enough money to Jarvis and their housekeeper, Abigail Lavin, to pay them for the next fifty years.  Less than twenty-four hours later, Tony heads back to Cambridge, leaving the company in Obie’s hands so he can finish his degrees.  If he’s running from something (everything), he doesn’t admit it aloud, and he never considers staying for the holidays.

In his spare time—what little there is of it—he sends designs back to R&D as far as he’s concerned, he’s already drawing them up whenever lectures spark an idea, so he might as well pass them on.  He revolutionises weapons development in the process, streamlining delivery and increasing payload efficiency and tweaking tiny things on everything from SI’s small arms to their guided missiles.

This, too, will come back to bite him in the arse, but in his last year at MIT he manages to transform SI into a billion-dollar multinational company without ever setting foot in the company proper.  Stark Industries becomes Stark International, and Tony’s net worth skyrockets.

Since the year he’d moved on to his Masters degrees, he’s been headhunted by just about every agency that makes up the United States’ law enforcement alphabet soup—CIA, FBI, NSA, NRO, DEA, ATF, and so on down the line—and more than a handful of foreign and international ones.  Now that he’s officially the face of SI and more actively contributing to R&D without Howard growling over his shoulder and criticising his every move, the offers follow nearly in direct relation to his bank accounts. He declines each one, because god knows he’d be nothing but a disaster under that kind of structure. It’s roughly as ludicrous as the idea of him trying to join any branch of the military: he’d skip the brig altogether and be dishonourably discharged for insubordination in the space of five minutes.  All the same, he takes a certain amount of perverse amusement in the pained looks the agents acquire, like successfully recruiting him might serve as sufficient emollient for the hassle of dealing with him.

The Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-enforcement Division (SHIELD) is the singular exception: Howard had been one of its founding members and sat on the Board of Directors, something Tony only finds out when he’s told that, as his father’s heir, this, too, had been left to him.  For the rest of December, he goes through whatever records are available to him, which is when he figures out who to call: Peggy herself had been another of its founders.  She’s officially retired, but he calls her anyway.

“SHIELD needs an executive director,” he says when the pleasantries have been done with.

“I’m retired, dear,” she replies, amusement in her voice, and he laughs.

“In name, yes,” he retorts, “but don’t try to tell me you have no idea what’s going on.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” she says airily, and he sighs theatrically.

“Of course you can’t.” Flipping through the folders on the desk in front of him, he asks, “Any suggestions?  I’m looking at the personnel files, and it seems like a Nick Fury’s been there with you and… dad from the start.”

If she notices the hesitation before “dad”, she has the tact not to mention it, but there’s a pregnant pause before she says carefully, “Have you met him?”

Clamping the phone between his shoulder and his ear, he shakes his head at the same time and almost drops it.  “No.  By your tone, though, I’d gather you don’t think he’d be a good choice.”

Again, that pause; then it’s her turn to sigh before she says, “He was—is—a good leader. He won’t let personal connections interfere with the greater cause.”

“So he’d need a Deputy who could balance that.”

“Precisely.”

This time he’s the one who pauses, eyes scanning rapidly through Fury’s service file for the fortieth time. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to come out of retirement?” he offers at last.

She just laughs, warm and reassuring even as she responds, ‘“Not a chance in hell.”

“It was worth a try.”

“Bring it to the Board,” she tells him.  “Suggest it, put it to a vote, and I’m willing to bet they’ll decide in his favour. You can determine a deputy after that.”

He nods, even though she can’t see him.  “Thanks.”

“Of course.” She doesn’t ask how he’s doing, and for that alone he could hug her.  They do the usual “take care of yourself” routine, then hang up before he calls for a Board meeting the next week.

As far as executive meetings go, that one is relatively painless: as Peggy had predicted, they vote in Fury’s favour.  They can’t decide on a deputy then and there, but the interim solution is to leave the board with what amounts to veto power until they find someone suitable. The following day, Tony meets with Fury in Cambridge to make the offer, and the other man doesn’t so much as blink before he accepts.

The rest of his time is mostly devoted to his dissertations.  Given the unusual nature of his academic pursuits and the similarities in two of his fields, the academic boards and department chairs have allowed him to use the same one for both his engineering degrees. He’d been perfectly willing to complete and defend three separate dissertations, but they seemed to be of the mind that he’d end up in a straitjacket and a room with padded walls if he did.

So he begins the development of a full-blown AI, à la Skynet, except less creepy.  If he had a nickel for every time he’s wished for something at which he could shout some revelation and have it recorded while he kept working, he’d be… well, richer than he already is, and he needs a new metaphor.  Ultimately, it translates to a voice recognition program that easily outstrips anything on the commercial (or non-commercial, or military) market.  Incorporating biometrics seems like a logical next step, which is how he takes a 1930s proposal for iris recognition and transforms it into a functional program—his dissertation is published in 1994; SI patents the technology by year’s end.  He also develops facial recognition technology about ten years before it’s cost-effective and reliable enough to make it available to the public, and manages to consolidate everything into two servers by the time he’s done.  His physics dissertation covers visual learning and its applications in robotics (with a side of chaos theory), and there’s enough crossover to influence the AI’s knowledge acquisition and the algorithms behind its information storage and translation.  By the time he’s done, the AI can do calculations usually requiring a supercomputer in the space of approximately two minutes.

For good measure, he publishes two papers on advanced developments in biometric technology ( _Progress in Quantum Electronics_ , _Advances in Applied Mechanics_ ) and one on robotics that’s a subdivision of his dissertation ( _Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics_ , _Reviews of Modern Physics_ ). Mostly people call it ego, and he doesn’t bother correcting them.

Jarvis comes out to Cambridge in his last year there, and when Tony shows him what he’s been working on, the older man raises his eyebrows, looks at the digital readouts on the monitors—projection and hologram monitors are next on his very long list of things that need inventing—and shakes his head.  “What we wouldn’t have done for this technology during the war,” he says.  “This is incredible work.”

The pride in his eyes makes Tony feel like he’s four years old and showing his father his first circuit board again, only this time the person on the other end of the conversation gives a damn.

“I’m calling it JARVIS,” he says with feigned nonchalance, though the fact that he’s staring at the floor and doing a fairly good impression of a shy, socially awkward six-year-old sort of renders that moot.  “Short for Just a Rather Very Intelligent System.”

For the first time in twenty-three years, he gets to see Edwin Jarvis speechless, and he wonders if he’s crossed a line somewhere.  With anyone else, he wouldn’t care, but this isn’t just anyone.

Then Jarvis smiles and says, “Seems rather redundant,” and Tony hears the “I am honoured” that goes unspoken.

Grinning back, he says only, “Yeah, well, I was feeling lazy.”

Jarvis laughs, sets about making tea for them both—he is literally the only reason Tony has a genuine china tea set in his home—and asks the usual questions about his life as they settle around the coffee table.  It’s the first conversation he’s had in a while that wasn’t a) conducted with a complete stranger or b) related to his degrees. 

\----------

 _17 May 1994_ ; _Manhattan, New York_

At twenty-three, Tony Stark graduates once again at the top of his class from MIT with doctorates in physics and mechanical and electrical engineering.  Much as he’d like to remain away from Manhattan, he no longer has an excuse, and so he returns to the headquarters of Stark International, the prodigal son come home.  His father’s heir, the papers still list him as CEO, but the day he gets back he attends one board meeting and promptly pulls Obie aside.

“I had intended for you to keep your job,” he says, easy and matter-of-fact.  “I don’t have any desire to take it from you.”

Obie’s been around since he was a kid, partly on business and partly as a family friend, the honourary uncle who’s always been there.  Tony trusts him, for all that he didn’t go out of his way to name an AI after him.  He’s spent too much time paraded around high society for it to be strange and new (in fact he finds it a boring, tedious, necessary evil and gets drunk at most of them to make them marginally more bearable), but that doesn’t mean he likes it; by contrast, Obie’s _good_ at it and seems to enjoy it, relatively speaking. Though Tony will come to respect how good a liar he is in about two decades, leaving him in charge of PR behind the Stark name makes perfect sense.

“It’s your company,” Obie points out reasonably; Tony just shrugs.

Pointing in the general direction of the conference room, he replies, “I’m not built for that and you know it.  They trust you, they know you, they like you.  I’d rather be in R&D, and if I have to put in an appearance or three to keep up our image, so be it, but this is you, not me.”

It doesn’t take much persuasion to get his father’s old friend to keep the responsibilities he’d adopted after Howard's death.  He’d served as the company’s CFO while Howard was alive, but it’s not as though his job description had changed all that much.  Tony doesn’t give it that much thought, moving himself out to Malibu and seamlessly stepping in to unofficially head up R&D.  He’s inherited a weapons manufacturing company he never wanted, but he takes some small comfort in the knowledge that his work is keeping American soldiers and their allies alive.  Rhodey’s been rising rapidly through the ranks since his OTS graduation (at which Tony _had_  been present, thank you very much), already a Captain and rumoured to be up for promotion yet again.  At the rate he’s going, he’ll make general before he’s forty and break Curtis LeMay’s record, but at the moment he’s deployed god only knows where—Bosnia or Macedonia or some other country in the region that ends in -ia—and Tony likes to think that however much he dislikes this part of his work, at least he’s keeping his friend safe.

\----------

 _20 May 2009; Kunar Province, Afghanistan_  

However fiercely one may try to avoid it, illusions fall, and Tony’s do so the way everything does in his life, which is to say explosively, chaotically, unavoidably.  Coming to in a cave in Afghanistan, sentenced to death by his own engineering and wired to a car battery with a hole in his chest means the denial stage passes with remarkable celerity.

At first, the panic overrides the pain: as far as he’s concerned, that makes epinephrine the best damn neurotransmitter in existence, and somewhere in the still-rational part of his consciousness he’s thinking _god, I love biology_.  Except that can only last so long, and when the adrenaline starts to dissipate, he almost wants it back.  There’s a _weight_  in his chest that has exactly nothing to do with the heft of the battery, and until that moment he had never quite understood the concept of pain levels so high they ceded to numbness.  Academically, he’d heard of it, knew the biology and neurology and neurochemistry behind convenient things like pain thresholds; personally, though, he’d had no idea what it felt like.  He wishes he still didn’t.

Ask anyone to describe him in a handful of words, and some variant of “stubborn” is inevitably going to make the list.  His captors demand Jericho missiles, now that they have their own pet weapons engineer, and he would have refused even if he hadn’t believed they’d kill him whether he did as asked or not.  Then they’re drowning him, and while the clinical part of his brain acknowledges it isn’t waterboarding, the rest of him couldn’t give a fuck what the official term is. If pressed, he wouldn’t have been able to determine which was worse—the sensation of drowning and water in his lungs, or the fear that the battery powering the magnet keeping him alive would either be disconnected or simply electrocute him.  He supposes at least the latter option means it would be over, because nothing they do erases the sick feeling that comes of seeing his guns in the hands of his captors, certainly not being dragged out to see the stacked crates tagged with his name.

By virtue of oxymoronically dumb luck and bad fortune, he shares his captivity with a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist who happens to have very convenient medical knowledge under his belt.  There’s something to be said about friendships forged in fire, etc., etc., and it isn’t just gratitude for saving his life that has Tony bargaining for Yinsen’s. Because of that, because he knows exactly what’s in the weapons cache his captors have, he pretends to give in, does just enough to make it look like he’s building the weapons they want instead of the one he needs.  He’s banking on the fact that if they knew enough to figure out what he was doing, they wouldn’t need him.

The first thing he does is find a replacement for the damned car battery, which would hardly have been a hard sell even if they’d managed to realise his starting point wasn't a new missile.  They need him alive, and that thing is heavy, inconvenient, and so far from reliable it belongs in a _Saturday Night Live_ sketch he hopes he never sees.  He’d built the arc reactor powering SI; in a move that literally defies the laws of physics, he miniaturises the tech and, 1.5 grams of palladium and a lot of copper wire later, shoves the end result into the casing in his chest. He knows it’ll work; he just isn’t certain if he wants it to.

Yinsen changes him as they work, reminds him of a meeting decades ago that he does not remember. When he points that out, the other man laughs, as though they aren’t being held captive by terrorists. “If I had been that drunk,” he replies, “I wouldn’t have been able to stand, much less give a lecture on integrated circuits.”

Yinsen: 1; Stark: 0.

For the most part, Tony prefers the company of machines to people, the easy silence, the clean logic, which is why he’s never been wont to work with a partner.  Finding someone who could keep up with him and didn’t require explanations every time his brain went from A to GG and back to M was nigh impossible.

This, though, this is different, and not just because they’re both prisoners of war.  Ho Yinsen is all the things he isn’t—or, in a few cases, all the things he _pretends_ he isn’t: he’s the smartest man Tony’s ever met, and more than that he’s a _good_ man, no pretence, no double-speak, no manipulation, no ulterior motives.

“What you just saw, that is your legacy, Stark,” he says vehemently, when Tony’s still reeling with the knowledge that he’s responsible for a million more deaths than he’d ever known. “Your life’s work, in the hands of those murderers.  Is that how you want to go out?  Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark?  Or are you going to do something about it?”

Voice as anhedonic as his expression, he replies, “Why should I do anything?  They’re going to kill me, you, either way, and if they don’t, I’ll probably be dead in a week.”

“Well then,” Yinsen observes with disarming ease, “this is a very important week for you, isn’t it?”

Yinsen: 2; Stark: 0.

As the days and weeks pass, they can’t work 24/7, and Yinsen speaks of family, about value, about the worth of a life.

“Got a family?” Tony asks one day, automatically.  They’re the farthest they can be from civilisation, but polite conversation still lingers on autopilot.

“Yes,” Yinsen replies without looking at him.  “And I will see them when I leave here.”  That, in hindsight, should have been a clue.  “And you, Stark?”

For a long moment, Tony holds his gaze, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  When it doesn’t, he says, “No.”

“No?  So you’re a man who has everything. And nothing.”

Yinsen: 3; Stark: 0.

Stuck in a cave they both believe they’re going to die in, Tony knows all too well that the money in his bank accounts and the patents in his offices don’t add up to a legacy worth much of anything that matters.  When half that legacy is, as Yinsen had pointed out, in the hands of murderers, _that_ definitely matters, only in all the worst ways.

As they develop the suit, as they come up with a plan to delay Raza and his men, Tony thinks he stands a chance of getting them both out.  It’s not until one of the best men he’s ever known lies bleeding out not ten feet from the entrance of the caves that he realises that was never the plan, and the bitterness sits in his chest like battery acid, a pun so awful it doesn’t deserve acknowledgement and yet so applicable it’s disheartening.

“Thank you for saving my life,” he tells the other man, the words painfully inadequate and yet the only thing of worth he has left to offer.

“Don’t waste it,” Yinsen whispers, “don’t waste your life,” and Tony thinks using last words on _him_ of all people is a waste in and of itself.

“I won’t,” he never has a chance to say, because Yinsen stops breathing before he can. 

\----------

 _20 August 2009_ ; _Kunar Province, Afghanistan_

He turns the ground outside those Afghan caves into a smoking wasteland.  It is token retribution, a gesture that will never repay the debt he owes a dead man, nor the vengeance owed him by his captors.  Wrapped in plate armour like some bizarre cross between a knight and a futuristic robot, he listens to the screaming of men burning alive, lets the explosions deafen him and never blinks. He is, in that moment, bulletproof and invincible, made of steel and every bit as unbreakable.

 _Airman Jimmy Forrest_ , he thinks as he engulfs eight of Raza’s men in flame, wishing he had a copy of that ridiculous photo he’d taken with the young soldier.

 _Airman First Class Doug Isaacs_ , he thinks as he steps farther from the cave and douses men and objects alike in more fire, hearing the younger man’s smothered laughter as Tony charms his way out of putting his foot in his mouth.

 _Airman First Class Isabel Cardona_ , he thinks as he sets the last crate aflame and detonates the payload in the remaining stockpile of missiles, remembering the instinctual, protective drive that pushed her out of the Humvee into the path of a bullet.

Their blood is on his hands, and the horizon glows crimson in stark contrast to the blinding, icy fury that drives him; he doesn’t stop to check for survivors.  He doesn’t care, and he knows he leaves some part of himself behind, dead in the ruins.  He doesn’t miss it.

Like a phoenix, he comes flying out of the flames with the last of the energy in the suit, too close to the allegory for comfort.  Survival is an open-ended question he faces with absolutely no optimism whatsoever, all he knows is that he refuses to die in those caves.  He’ll take a blaze of literally burning glory, painted rebirth and death across the skies, if it means he can take the bastards down with him.

They go down.

He’s still breathing.

He doesn’t understand why.

\----------

 _20 August 2009_ ; _somewhere in the Afghanistan desert_

Crash landing in desert sand isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds.  Since most people would say it doesn’t sound like much fun at all, well, take that at face value.  Buried in the midst of scattered metal and leather and wiring that are all that remains of the Mark I, the fact that he doesn’t have any broken bones is nothing so much as a minor miracle.  He claws his way out of the sand (and can’t help thinking of the phoenix—phoenixes? phoenii? never mind, he can do Latin later—and ashes again) and looks around to see nothing but more sand.  In the baking heat, it doesn’t seem altogether farfetched to think he’s going to die of heatstroke, dehydration, or both relatively soon.  He pushes on regardless, resolutely, because to sit there and wait is to quit, and Tony Stark has never been good at the whole quitting thing.

He loses track of how long he spends on his feet, staggering through an endless ocean of sand. It can’t be more than a few hours, tops; it feels like days.

The unmistakeable _whup-whup_ of Pave Hawk helicopter blades cutting through the air is the most reassuring sound he’s ever heard, and for a fleeting moment he thinks he’s going to end up like one of those people stranded at sea, waving frantically from a raft at a passing cruiseliner that hasn’t the foggiest idea of their existence. Then Rhodey’s hitting the ground with a Pararescue team, and Tony’s never been so relieved to see people in his life as he drops to his knees, like their appearance has driven away whatever energy had been keeping him upright.

“How was the funvee?” Rhodey quips at him, and he cracks a smile.  “Next time you ride with me, okay?” his friend says as he drops a hand on his shoulder, and the sound Tony makes is somewhere between a laugh and a sob and goes mercifully unheard beneath the din of the choppers. Holding his head up suddenly requires more effort than he has, and he lets it fall onto Rhodey’s shoulder as he’s pulled into a hug, Jarvis saying “he will make a good commander” echoing in his ears.

 _Thank god he was right_ , he thinks. He intends to say it aloud, but the words never make it past his lips.

\----------

_21 August 2009; Landstuhl Medical Center, Germany_

He wakes in the US Army’s Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany, having apparently lost consciousness somewhere between Rhodey finding him and being shuffled off the helicopters onto the waiting C-130 bound for Ramstein AFB.  Initially he thinks he’s paralysed, his body refusing to obey his commands to move as he tries to figure out where the hell he is and where the threat is.  His brain registers Rhodey’s voice calling his name before the rest of him does, but it pushes the choking panic back just enough to let him behave like a coherent human being instead of punching his best friend in the face.

Looking up, he sees Rhodey standing by the bed.  “Hey,” he says hoarsely.

“Hey,” the colonel replies.  “You look like shit,” he adds, but the teasing tone is belied by the worry pressed in around his eyes.

“I’d like to see _you_  survive in a cave for three months and develop a flying suit of armour,” Tony croaks back, not about to be defeated by the fact that his mouth feels as dry as the desert he’d just left.

The corners of Rhodey’s mouth quirk up, just barely.  “Between the two of us, which one is an actual rocket scientist?”

Tony’s answering crack about an aerospace engineering degree not being up to snuff is interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon and a nurse.  He won’t know this until years later, but the only reason they’re so much as allowed in his room when he’s got that much proprietary, unconventional tech in his body is because they’re SHIELD.

The tally the doctor gives him should be shocking, or perhaps depressing; instead, what he finds shocking is the fact that the list isn’t longer.  Cracked ribs, they tell him.  Dislocated shoulder, they tell him.  Concussion, they tell him.  As-yet-inconclusive damage to his autonomic nervous system, they tell him.  Severe dehydration and moderate malnutrition, they tell him.  Given that he never anticipated surviving, he can’t bring himself to be upset.  He’s got minor burns here and there, but he (they) had insulated the suit better than he (they) had thought.

“You should keep that arm in a sling for at least a few extra days,” the doctor says. His name is Pierre Beauvais, and he’s blond and grey-eyed and doesn’t look old enough to drink, never mind be a board-certified cardiac surgeon in four countries.  “And go easy on it for a bit.  As far as dislocations go, it was relatively low-grade, but even so.”  Behind the doctor’s back, Rhodey’s trying not to smile—he knows Tony well enough to know that’ll never happen.  Then Dr Beauvais hesitates, and Tony’s learnt that when doctors do that, it’s never a good sign.  “We repaired as much of the damage to your sternum as possible,” he says, and that’s not nearly as horrifying as Tony was expecting.  “Most of it was cosmetic; whoever originally set the casing in place knew what they were doing.”  Tony flinches, then savagely restrains it; Beauvais wisely refrains from commenting.  “It should heal easier now, though since I hear you’re the engineer, we’ll leave the wiring to you, as there’s no indication it’s doing you any harm at the moment.

“We’d like to keep you overnight,” Beauvais continues, but Tony shakes his head and bites back a wince at the dizziness that follows—he knows better than to make sharp head movements post-concussion.  God knows he’s had enough of those in his lifetime.

“No,” he says flatly. “He—”  He gestures at Rhodey.  “—is undoubtedly going to haul me back home personally, and if experience is anything to go by, if I haven’t keeled over already, I’m not going to.  So you can release me, or I’ll sign myself out AMA.”

Nodding as though he’d been prepared for that, Beauvais glances at his nurse and says, “Then we’ll take care of that shoulder to allow for some range of motion, send some scripts down to the pharmacy, and if nothing on your monitors goes off the charts in the next two hours, you’ll be free to go.”

Well aware it’s the best deal he’s going to get, Tony concedes.

\----------

 _22 August 2009_ ; _Edwards Air Force Base, California_

Nothing changes. Everything changes.

Once he’s Stateside again, walking slowly down the ramp of the cargo plane and leaning heavily on Rhodey (it’s that or the wheelchair, and he’d rather get blown up again than not literally set foot on home soil), he has the absurd sensation that he can breathe again.

“A few tears for your long-lost boss?” he teases Pepper Potts to buy himself some time.

Whether by telepathy or instinct or something else entirely, she smiles and answers, “Tears of joy. I hate job hunting.” She’d gone from temp to secretary to PA and become family and one of his few genuine friends in the process, from the moment she stood in his workshop and refused to take his bullshit. Every once in a while, they know each other well enough to read the other’s mind, and he thanks all sorts of deities in which he doesn’t believe that today happens to be one of them. He doesn’t know what he’d have done if she’d fallen apart on him—more likely than not he’d have joined her, and wouldn’t that be a sight for the press and the entire base.

He’s had plenty of time to consider his priorities, so he finds a cheeseburger that, right then, outdoes any meal he’s ever had at a five-star restaurant, and requests (orders) a press conference.  The protests are expected; he bowls right over them, knowing full well they’ll assume all he wants to do is stand in front of the cameras and celebrate the genius of him being alive.

They think he’s sitting down for sake of charm and _bonhomie_ and the usual Tony Stark I-don’t-give-a-fuck; he lets them, because to do otherwise means admitting the vertigo has his vision blacking out and he’s not certain he’d manage to _remain_ on his feet long enough to get his point made.

With contradictory “nothing to see here, move on” and “this is the most important thing I’ll ever say on behalf of the company, listen up”, he says, “I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend and protect them.  And I saw that I had become a part of a system that was comfortable with zero accountability.”

He pushes himself to his feet as he answers a question, steadier now though he’s reaching for the podium as subtly as possible once he’s behind it.  And then he throws SI and its investors and the press on their heads, announcing, “Effective immediately, I am shutting down the weapons manufacturing division of Stark International, until such a time as I can decide what the future of this company will be, what direction it should take, one that I’m comfortable with and is consistent with the highest good for this country, as well.”

Obie’s trying to shuffle him off the stage before he’s even finished speaking, damage control by deflection as the press shouts questions that go unanswered.

Predictably, everyone from Obie to Rhodey begins trying to talk him out of it.  “We’re a weapons manufacturer—that’s what we do, we’re iron mongers.  We make weapons,” Obie says like he’s talking to a child, and Tony thinks but doesn’t bother to say, _nowhere in the company name is “weapons” used_.  He tries to push arc reactor technology, and when it’s brushed off as a gimmick to appease environmentalists, he adds it to his personal agenda instead.  Given all that, if he weren’t so preoccupied he’d have recognised that dismissal and Obie pushing to see the new tech as the more blatant beginning of the end. But he doesn’t, and hindsight is 20-20, etc.

\----------

 _23 August 2009_ ; _Malibu, California_

Somewhere around 0200h, JARVIS shuts down his workstations and kicks him out of the lab with more authority than Tony thinks he should be able to have, his own programming notwithstanding.

“I built you, you know,” he points out as he heads for the elevators.  No one ever said writing the code precluded bitching about the results.

“Yes, sir, you did,” JARVIS responds, and an AI really shouldn’t be able to initiate that big a guilt-trip.

The too-young Dr Beauvais has him on a cocktail of antibiotics, prescription NSAIDs, beta-blockers and midodrine (until he can get the arc reactor to fix whatever the hell is going on with his ANS), muscle relaxants, and oxycodone, with a side bonus of emergency Xanax.  He hates that he has to take them, because they’re one more reminder of what he will never, ever be able to stop carrying with him, and more to the point he can’t _think_ when he’s on them.  In uni, that would have been a blessing; now, he can’t afford that luxury. But he swallows them down anyway, skipping the Xanax and knowing better than to mix them with alcohol no matter how tempting it is—the side effects alone are a bitch, and with all the contraindications this particular combination would never be prescribed to a living person if there had been any other choice—and heads for the shower on autopilot.

The suit he’s been wearing since the plane landed gets dumped unceremoniously in a heap on the bathroom floor.  It’s custom tailored and worth at least six grand, but the very thought of wearing it—any of it—again makes his skin crawl.  He avoids looking at himself in the mirror as he turns the shower on and steps under the spray, mildly grateful that it’s not a restriction.  For one brief moment, there’s _feeling_. Ninety-five percent of it might be the pain of hot water on open, hypersensitive skin, but he couldn’t care less because this is _his_ choice, and by god he’s going to be clean and stop smelling like the antiseptic-death scent of hospitals.

Then there’s water sluicing over his head into his eyes and mouth and down his throat and he can’t breathe anymore.

He has no idea how long he blanks out, coming to sitting on the floor of the shower with his knees hugged to his chest as he struggles to get enough oxygen into his body. The water’s been turned off, so at least he’s not about to inauspiciously drown in an inch of water, and JARVIS’ “sir” comes with human levels of urgency that suggest he was the one to shut the water off and that it’s been a while.

“Yeah,” he manages to say, forcing the words past the tightness in his throat.  “JARVIS, I’m good.”

The AI could respond with all the ways in which he’s clearly not (tachycardia, hyperventilation, hypertension, muscle tremors, adrenaline overload, all in spite of the medications intended to control those things), but he doesn’t, and if he were a person Tony would kiss him for that discretion.

“Shall I call—”

“No,” he interrupts, in a tone that would be sharp if his voice were steady.  “No, don’t call… anyone.”

There’s an eloquent pause, and then JARVIS concedes, “Very well, sir.”

“I should have taken the damn Xanax,” Tony mutters to himself as he forces his muscles to unlock, clambering awkwardly to his feet and reaching for a towel.  He knows exactly what PTSD looks like; now he knows what it feels like, and though he resolutely refuses to go find a psychologist, he knows enough to understand that exposure therapy has its limits, and that shower is a lost cause for now.

So he pulls on a t-shirt, finds a pair of pants that won’t strangle him in his sleep, and falls into bed focussed determinedly on nothing more than his breathing.  He doesn’t expect to fall asleep, but he does. He _does_ expect to dream, and if he wakes an hour later in a cold sweat, panting like he’s run a marathon, there’s no one to bear witness but JARVIS.

\----------

 _23 August 2009 - 21 October 2009_ ; _Malibu, California_

He wakes later that day to plummeting stock prices and Jim Cramer ridiculing him on television: “A weapons company that doesn’t make weapons!”

He ignores it. Far worse has been said about him on far more widely-reaching circuits than that.

He starts spending more and more time in his workshop, at first because he _has_ to refine the arc reactor now that he has the full gamut of proper equipment at hand: he and Yinsen had gotten it to basic pacemaker levels of functionality, but it’s not enough to compensate for the holistic damage long-term.  And so begins the long, involved, convoluted process of designing the neural interfacing, streamlining it with JARVIS’ coding and programming biometrics on a scale heretofore unheard of. Unlike a lot of people, he’s made regular, profuse utilisation of his degrees since he graduated, but until now the benefit has never been quite so personal.

That said, nearly scaring the life out of Pepper was not in the plan—what’s a little cardiac arrest between friends?—but then again, neither was needing four hands to deal with the machine in his chest.  Once that’s stabilised, he settles into a zeroed-in single-mindedness unusual even for him, focussed solely on refining the suit, transforming it into something far more sophisticated than the crude shield that had bought him his freedom.

In the years since he developed JARVIS to the point of true, high-level functionality, the AI has been integrated into almost everything: his phones, his homes, his cars, you name it and he’s probably there.  Therefore, implementing JARVIS into the suit itself is a non-issue to the point of being instinctual.  Targeting, weapons deployment, a HUD that can distinguish between enemies and non-combatants, that lets him recognise and read heat signatures and analyse radiation and hazardous material and plot trajectories—it all comes down to JARVIS. They had laid Edwin Jarvis to rest ten years ago, but in the days and weeks after Afghanistan, Tony misses his steady presence more than he ever has since then, something he hadn’t thought possible.  The AI that is his namesake closes the gap, albeit with a heavier dose of sarcasm than his human predecessor had ever allowed himself, but the voice that surrounds him isn’t quite the same as the man who had supported him.

Except the more time he spends holed away in his workshop, the more the rest of the world thinks he’s lost his mind; even so, it’s not until the board collectively votes to file an injunction against him that he realises the extent to which they believe Afghanistan has rendered him _non compos mentis_. In spite of that, he doesn’t bother calling bullshit.  He still has controlling interest in his own company, and more to the point has things of greater importance to do with his time, so he lets Obie tell him it’s for his own good, it’s to protect him, and glad-hand his way through SI’s shareholders.  Tony himself has never cared overmuch for the opinions of the general public (if he did, there wouldn’t be a tabloid left in business); now would be a poor time to start.

\----------

 _22 October 2009_ ; _Gulmira, Afghanistan_

He earnt the title “Merchant of Death” when he was still in his twenties, owner of the United States’ most prominent weapons manufacturing company.  It’s intended as a compliment, a variant on the camaraderie amongst soldiers; he speaks their language, so for all his bluster and money and panache and distinct lack of a uniform, there’s a certain measure of respect.  He learns to accept it: there are, after all, worse things one can be called.

This time, though, he takes up the mantle as it _could_ have been, judge, jury, and executioner in iron (gold-titanium alloy) and fire raining down from the sky like something out of the Ten Commandments.  This is vengeance, retribution, an attempt to balance a ledger that will forever tip the scales against him.  This is the desperate, bitter resolution that his weapons will never again be the reason American soldiers are dying in war zones.  This is silent, angry pleading that his designs will not harm the innocent.

Christine Everhart had thrown him for a loop at that fireman’s benefit with her questions of SI’s double-dealing to the enemy.  When the denial had faded, helped along by the black-and-white evidence dug up from the bowels of the company’s financials, the pieces very slowly began to come together.

Gulmira is first, the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back, and he decimates half the glass in the workshop with the repulsors out of helpless fury.  Then he steps into the array of robots and waits like a statue as they assemble the new suit, flashy in crimson and gold, around him before he takes to the skies in the first actual combat flight since he finalised the design.  It’s fitting, in a way, that this should be the first: Yinsen and his family may be dead, residents of the city no longer, but Tony owes the man his life, and the least he can do is stand between his people and Raza’s. It’s the screaming, the sobbing pleas, that he hears first, even through the crack of automatic gunfire and the roar of wind past his suit.  So he dives, takes a certain vicious pleasure in sending the men who had sought to kill him, who are in Gulmira to kill innocent civilians, flying through the air and whatever other barriers stand in their way.  For the first time since May, when he woke to see the SI logo on cases of weaponry in enemy territory, he is proud of what he’s built; he’s spent enough time around weapons to know how to use them, and he knows damn well there isn’t a sharpshooter alive who could have taken out every single attacker simultaneously while leaving the hostages untouched.

And yet, when Yinsen’s people—they will always, to him, be Yinsen’s people—try to thank him, he can’t listen. He doesn’t deserve their thanks. He _put_ them in harm’s way.

\----------

There’s something cathartic and freeing about being alone in the sky, weightless and invisible with no one but JARVIS in his ear.  “I don’t have anyone else but you,” he tells Pepper, and that’s true insofar as JARVIS isn’t tangible, but it doesn’t escape him that his best friend and closest confidant is an AI that he himself built.

Because it’s JARVIS who holds all his most closely guarded secrets, JARVIS who has never ceased to be there for him.  He’s Tony’s design, based on a man who was the epitome of steadfast, always in his corner even when it meant telling him he was being a narrow-minded arse, so maybe it’s a _de facto_ state of being for the electronic version.  It says more than Tony’s really comfortable examining that in spite of all that, he still half-expects his own AI to turn on him one day.  But it’s JARVIS’ voice guiding him through the first test flight, reservations about needing more testing aside.  JARVIS is the one who manages to warn him before he freezes his suit and ends up crashing through his own house and breaking one of his cars (the fact that those two events were not actually successive isn’t quite the point).  JARVIS—along with Rhodey, like a surreal flashback to his uni days—is the one who keeps him in flight when the US military thinks he’s deployed a new weapon and tries to shoot him out of the skies.

It’s a trust, a bond, between pilot and AI, and there are moments when he can revel in the pure novelty of flying this way, clocking speed and calculating wind shear and knowing it has nothing to do with a plane.  He has his pilot’s licence, and he’d thought nothing could top his first solo flight, but this is utterly incomparable.  Perhaps more importantly, it does what nothing else ever could: it lets him stop thinking.

\----------

 _24 October 2009_ ; _Los Angeles, California_

In a move filled with far too much you-should-have-seen-this-coming, Stane paralyses him and tears the reactor straight from his chest.

“When I ordered the hit on you,” Stane begins, and Tony would have frozen if it hadn’t been done for him. Really, Stane should have led with that; he wouldn’t have needed a machine for the paralysis if he had.

Tony’s getting very tired of v-fib, almost as tired as he is of having his own tech used against him (not approving that device was the smartest move the US government’s made in a while; not destroying every prototype was his stupidest), and he thinks yet again that he’s going to die, only this time he’s sitting on his own godforsaken sofa.  Yinsen’s last words ring in his ears as he calculates the exact amount of time needed for his body to start working again and weighs it against the amount of life he has left in him.  He’d almost gotten used to things like respiratory and heart rates going back to normal—he’d be counting his heartbeats if they weren’t so damn erratic.

Maybe it’s the last words of a dead friend; maybe it’s contumacious tenacity; maybe it’s nothing more than a vehement refusal to lose on someone else’s terms.  All the same, he manages to drag himself into the elevator and stagger his way into his workshop in a final Hail Mary despite his ANS going haywire and the lingering effects of the device he swears he’s going to collect and blow up as soon as he can a) stand, and b) find ten extra seconds.  It seems like the ultimate mockery that he succeeds in dragging himself across the floor only to have the emergency backup be an inch away that may as well be a mile, a desert mirage taunting him with its nearness.  Then DUM-E comes whirring over to him, handing the box to him and looking as concerned as a robot without a face or voice can be.

“Good boy,” Tony mumbles, thinking he doesn’t give the bot nearly enough credit and wouldn’t care if he got hit with a fire extinguisher.

Covering his face with his arm, he smashes the glass casing against the floor and makes a note to himself to thank Pepper and buy her something very, very expensive once he gets done saving her from the sociopathic maniac he used to look up to.  As if on cue, Rhodey comes flying into the workshop, shouting Tony’s name and god it’s déjà vu all over again.

Hauling him upright, he asks, “Are you okay?” even though Tony knows they’ve both seen corpses with better colour.

He doesn’t know how his friend knew to come and at the moment doesn’t care, just says, “Where’s Pepper?”

Knowing what he does, he's painfully aware an entire platoon couldn’t take Stane down, never mind five agents likely armed with no more firepower than service-issue semiautomatic handguns. Half-hanging off Rhodey, he directs his friend over to the assembly platform; shortly thereafter, the suit’s sufficient support to bear his weight, and the old reactor core is kicking in enough to make him feel marginally less like microwaved death.

“You need me to do anything else?” Rhodey asks, and there sparks a wealth of gratitude Tony doesn’t know how to voice.

Aloud, he replies, “Keep the skies clear” as he drops the faceplate, and hopes his friend hears what he doesn’t say.  Then he blasts through the ceiling: expediency is the priority; he can worry about construction later.

In what will come to be a trend for him, they tear half the city apart, only this time it’s a fight rife with unspoken vitriol.  “Battle to the death” should be a monumental cliché; it’s more than a little ridiculous that it’s not, and all he can do is hope against hope that the civilians have the sense to get themselves clear.

“For thirty years I’ve been holding you up!” Stane snarls at him, rancour so thick it sounds like it has to have been festering for every one of those thirty years. “I built this company from nothing!  And nothing is going to stand in my way—least of all you!”

Tony doesn’t bother to issue a verbal response, the list of potential counterarguments being a mile long and enough to fill a twelve-hour speech.  More to the point, he wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to start.  Instead, he attacks.

 _You sold me out_ lies behind every repulsor blast. _You tried to have me killed_ rings with every crash of breaking glass and rending metal. _You betrayed me_ drives him forward when he’s almost out of power and he banks his life—everyone’s lives—on the assumption Stane won’t have figured out the icing problem. (“Sir, it appears that his suit can fly,” JARVIS helpfully informs him; Tony thinks, _I’d have sworn you were smarter than that_ and says, “Duly noted”.)  They weren’t in his original blueprints, and there’s a _reason_ Tony’s been in charge of R &D.

And when he’s hanging by his literal fingertips over the massive arc reactor, screaming for Pepper to overload the damn system already (“You’ll die!” she screams back; “What else is new?” he wants to shout in return), he has the same thought he did coming out of those Afghan caves: _you. won’t. win_.  Winning is no longer measured by his own survival but by the fall of his enemies, and as he lies gasping for breath on the rooftop, staring at the sky and wondering yet again how the fuck he’s still alive, he thinks that at least he hasn’t wasted his second chance.  Not yet.

Then the reactor overload combines with the remaining arsenal in Stane’s suit, and he’s not doing much thinking at all.

\----------

 _25 October 2009_ ; _Los Angeles, California_

When he gets up in front of the press, carefully immaculate under the meticulous application of Pepper’s concealer, he feels for a moment like two months haven’t passed and he’s back where he started after he got home.  “No bombshells,” he’d promised, and he meant it when he said it.

He stays standing this time (god bless technology), and when he opens his mouth, he fully intends to confirm the robotic-prototype-malfunction cover story that ostensibly occurred while he himself was on his yacht with fifty fictional people, and the bodyguard he’d hired post-Afghanistan took care of it.  What comes out, after some unscripted rambling, is, “I am Iron Man,” and from the back of the room Pepper looks like she wants to throw her purse at him, while SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson just wears an exasperated expression that conveys “we should have seen that coming” rather clearly.

Predictably, the press explodes, shouting questions at him that he can barely distinguish with them yelling over one another.  He holds up a hand, says that SI will be contributing significantly to repair the damage done the previous night, and tells them he’ll take exactly three questions.

When he gets back to the appropriated green room, he wants to be apologetic.  The problem is that he would be lying, and he’s sick of lies.

“Tony, what were you thinking?” Pepper says, at almost the exact same time that Coulson snaps, “Stark, what the hell happened to staying on script?”

He eyes them both, then shelves the sarcasm and replies with the same argument he’d given before he walked in: “How long could we have sold that story?”  He waits, looks from one to the other as they say nothing. “Exactly.”  Shoving his hands in his pockets, he leans back against whoever’s desk it is that happens to be in the room.  “I have no intentions of shoving the armour in a corner and never touching it again, and even _our_ press will at some point make the connection that I and my ‘bodyguard’ never happen to be in the same place at the same time.  There are only so many miraculous appearances we can justify before someone starts digging, and if Christine Everhart can come up with the question at _this_ press conference, it won’t take the rest of them that long.”

Throwing up her hands, Pepper’s voice turns a hair toward shrill as she informs him, “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“She’s right,” Coulson says. “You’re not a soldier, Stark, anymore than you’re law enforcement.”

“I’m not,” Tony agrees, “and maybe you’re right.  But I’ve already almost died about four times in the last five months.  It’s kind of irrelevant at this point.”

Pepper flinches like he’s slapped her across the face, and he wants to reach out, to apologise, to explain. Because he knows he never can, he keeps his hands where they are.  “Ho Yinsen died getting me out of that fucking cave,” he points out, his flat expression paradoxical beside his word choice, “and I’m not about to pay that back with the whole king-in-a-gilded-castle bit or whatever.”

Neither Coulson nor Pepper seem to have anything to say to that, so he pushes himself to his feet, nods at them, and then heads for the car where Happy’s waiting.

\----------

 _25 October 2009_ ; _Malibu, California_

By the time he gets back to Malibu, it’s dusk, pastels fading into darkness on the horizon. He nods his thanks to Happy and makes his way into the garage entrance, and it isn’t until the doors have shut that JARVIS speaks.

“Sir, Director Fury is here.”

One foot hovers in the air as he pauses for a beat before continuing forward.  “J, I thought we had the house on lockdown.”

Sounding faintly apologetic, JARVIS agrees.  “We did. The Director entered the override codes.”

As he hits the elevator button, he shakes his head at himself and mutters, “At some point I’m sure that seemed like a good idea.”

“Indeed,” JARVIS observes wryly.

That warning is the only reason why he doesn’t jump—or scream, or reach for something that might serve as a last-ditch weapon—when he walks into the great room and sees a figure standing silhouetted against the windows.  Otherwise, the memory of Stane (in a fully fucking lit room, but that’s not the point) is too close; the memory of _everything_ is too close, and even with the heads-up he feels the edgy sensation and the taste of metal at the back of his throat of a sudden adrenaline rush.

“ ‘I am Iron Man’,” Fury says without so much as a hello.  “You think you’re the only superhero in the world?  Mr Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe,” he continues, turning to cross the room.  “You just don’t know it yet.”

He steps into the light, and Tony keeps his expression schooled carefully blank.  “What do you want, Nick?”

He expects evasion. He gets an answer: “I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative.”

Frankly, “The Avenger Initiative” sounds like a ridiculous name for a project.  Tony knows what _he’s_ avenging; he’s not at all sure what the hell everyone else is supposed to be going for. But he doesn’t say any of that to Fury, just heads for the bar to pour himself two fingers of bourbon and wordlessly hands a tumbler of cognac to the director as he explains what he has in mind.

“You’re trying to get Banner.”  It’s a statement, not a question, and Fury nods.  “Good luck with that.”

Fury shrugs one shoulder the way a horse would shrug off a fly: “insignificant”, the motion says. “We have eyes on him.”

Once again Tony keeps his expression bland and sips at his drink.  “Yes, because _that’s_ going to get him to come back to the US government.”

“Technically we’re international.”

His timing is perfect, and Tony nearly snorts bourbon out his nose.  “Ow,” he says after a beat, in which Fury looks thoroughly unapologetic.  “And ‘technically’ might fly with Banner, but I doubt the Hulk will give a rat’s ass.” He leans back, tossing an arm across the back of the sofa.  “Sounds like you’ve had this in development for a while.”  When Fury nods, Tony surveys him silently for a moment before continuing, “Then why was I on your radar?  All my magic enhancements only happened two months ago.”

He tries to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.  If the twitch of Fury’s eyebrows is anything to go by, he fails.

“When I put this in development, Stark International was still making weapons,” is the blunt answer.

Tony blinks, then narrows his eyes.  “Ah. My decision stands,” he says, because he feels he has to.

“I know.” Knocking back the rest of his drink in a way that has Tony instinctively wanting to protest that good cognac deserves to be savoured, Fury sets the glass on the coffee table and answers the unspoken question: “I’m approaching you in an offensive capacity, not an R&D one.”

There’s a certain measure of “don’t trust anything he says” to Colonel Nicholas J Fury, but Tony puts that aside for another day and says only, “Who else do you have in mind?”

\----------

 _April 2010_ ; _Malibu, California_

He gets six months. Between returning Stateside and coming to the conclusion that he’s poisoning himself, he gets six months.

“Unfortunately, the device that is keeping you alive is also killing you,” JARVIS says, and there is so much irony in that statement that you could write a book dense enough to serve as a ship’s anchor.

It’s slow, palladium creeping through his bloodstream like tar and leaving him staring death in the face (again).  The steady, persistent pain of the reactor casing is something he’s slowly getting used to, filing it away under white noise as much as humanly possible.  He learns to breathe with it, makes it a part of him since his choices are rather limited.  This, though, feels like the universe is flipping him off or rubbing salt into the wounds, or maybe both.  He fights, developing a palladium metre that he begins using to monitor his blood toxicity more frequently than the most paranoid diabetic on the planet.  He forces down glasses of liquid chlorophyll that taste exactly the way he’d thought grass would taste, except worse, but that’s merely postponing the inevitable: he can’t keep up the chlorophyll intake at a sufficient amount to counter the palladium. He fights because that is his nature, but he feels like he’s paying a debt owed, so he keeps the suit in play, keeps making the rounds of society as though everything is normal, and resigns himself to his own death.  At least this time he has warning.

JARVIS is the only one he tells, under threat of dismantling him and spreading the components through PCs. To tell anyone else is to be forced to stop, as though stopping would somehow save him, and to date JARVIS has never betrayed him.

\----------

 _24 April 2010_ ; _Malibu, California_

“You do it,” he says offhandedly in the middle of an argument with Pepper about stock prices and the liberal agenda.

“I do what?” she asks, exasperated, just as he thinks, _god, I’m a genius_! He even has the paperwork to prove that one.

“Excellent idea, I just figured this out—you run the company.”

The look she gives him in answer should be in a _Simpson’s_ episode.  “Yeah.”

“Pepper, I need you to run the company.”

“I’m _trying_ to run the company.”  Her expression says she thinks he’s being more than a little slow on the uptake.

“Well, stop trying to do it and do it.”

If her hands weren’t full, this is the point at which she’d probably be throwing them in the air. “ _You_ will not give me information that I need in order to actually do it.”

So he clarifies, which mostly means they end up talking over one another: “I’m not asking you to _try_ to do it, I’m asking you to physically do it.  I need you to do it.”

“I _am_ trying to do it!” she protests, and if he weren’t currently her boss he’s pretty sure she’d have smacked him by now.

“You’re not listening to me!” he finally exclaims.

“No, you’re not listening to me!” she retorts, at exactly the same moment that he says, “I’m trying to make you CEO.  Why won’t you let me??”

Perhaps he should have opened with that, because she stops mid-sentence with her mouth open in shock as he speaks.  Then she blinks and leans in.

“Have you been drinking?” That’s not exactly the reaction he’d been going for, but he supposes it’s not entirely unjustified, either. (Okay, it’s not at all unjustified, but that’s beside the point.)

“Uh, chlorophyll,” he responds, which only serves to confuse her further.  Taking advantage of the moment and trying to save himself from having to explain, he steps toward her, dropping his hands on her shoulders. “I hereby, irrevocably, appoint you Chairman and CEO of Stark International.  Effective immediately.”

Then he pulls away, suddenly feeling bereft, as though someone had walked over his grave or he’d just signed his own death certificate; _knowing_ he’s going to die is apparently different than taking steps toward planning for it, despite the fact Pepper’s been taking on the responsibilities of CEO over the past decade. So he nods once, claps her on the shoulder, and turns away, saying only, “Yeah, done deal. Okay?”

She stares after him, eyes wide and shaking her head, and he thinks it’s a good thing she doesn’t have a background in psychology; if she did, the whole giving your possessions away thing would be going up like a subconscious road flare.

“I’ve actually given this a great deal of thought, believe it or not,” he says as DUM-E approaches with two champagne flutes and a bottle in ice, knowing that it seems like nothing more than another spontaneous Tony Stark decision.  “Doing a bit of headhunting, so to speak, trying to figure out who a worthy successor would be.”  He pops the cork, champagne bubbling out over his hand, and looks over his shoulder at her with a small, fond smile.  “And then I realised, it’s you.  It’s always been you.”

In his peripheral vision, he’s aware of her moving, sees her sinking onto the chair like her legs won’t hold her weight anymore.  He pretends he doesn’t notice, pouring two glasses and rambling, “I thought there would be a legal issue, but actually I’m, ah, capable of appointing my successor. My successor being you,” he adds, just in case trauma-induced retrograde amnesia’s erased the entire preceding conversation.

He doesn’t say he’s had JARVIS combing through every single contract remotely related to the company to verify that exact information.  If he doesn’t say that, he can pass this off as mere laziness, and since his hatred of the board is legendary, it’s hardly implausible.  He holds out a glass as he approaches, and she tips her head back to track his face as he does; he hopes she can’t read any of the things he’s not telling her.  “Congratulations,” he says, and the slow, stunned smile on her face is just one more thing he’s going to miss.

She’s still shaking her head, but he pushes the glass toward her, refusing to take no for an answer on this. “Take it, just take it.” It applies to the champagne as much as the promotion.

“I don’t know what to think,” she says as he sits beside her, and he flashes her a grin.

“Don’t think, drink.” Which sounds sufficiently like him to hide the awkwardness, to keep the “I’m sorry” and the “I’m going to miss you” and “please forgive me” from spilling out.  She laughs, disbelieving and pleased all at once, and he clinks his glass to hers.

He knows this isn’t entirely fair, foisting an entire company on her, but the truth is exactly what he can’t tell her: he wants to ensure SI remains in good hands when he’s gone, and of everyone he knows, Pepper Potts will never be the person who takes them back to weapons manufacturing, who turns on him and betrays his faith.

\----------

 _25 April 2010 - 11 May 2010_ ; _Malibu, California_

In the weeks that follow, as the palladium increasingly leaches into his body, he begins spiralling out of control.  He’s smart enough to see it happening, he simply doesn’t care.  Pepper knows something’s not quite right, as evidenced when she asks what he isn’t telling her.  _So many things_ , he thinks, but all he says is, “I don’t want to go home,” because Venice really would be a nice place to die, if he had a choice. Rhodey knows something’s not right, has since the night he half-carried Tony over to his desk, looked at the reactor core, and asked, “Is it supposed to be smoking like that?” and, “You had this in your _body_?”

“Contrary to popular belief,” he tells his friend quietly, “I actually do know what I’m doing.” It’s just that the answer happens to be, _everything I can before I die_.

Even Natalie fucking Rushman knows something’s not right.  Granted, he all but hands that one to her on a silver platter when he asks, “If this was your last birthday party you were ever going to have, how would you celebrate it?”

He knows she knows it’s not as hypothetical as he makes it out to be, can see the solemnity in her eyes despite her smile when she answers, “I’d do whatever I wanted to do, with whoever I wanted to do it with.”

And, if anyone _hadn’t_ known things were going off the rails, he and Rhodey nearly demolishing his own house would have clued them in.  It’s a strange, medieval tableau: two armoured knights fighting one another with anachronistically explosive weapons, and all they’d need to make it even more phantasmagoric is a couple of horses and perhaps a lance or two. He’s not sure if he feels resigned or a little betrayed as he opens his eyes in time to watch his friend fly off with the Mark II.

Then Nick Fury shows up as he’s down to seventy-two hours left to live, sitting in a donut that serves as a restaurant sign, eating a box of much more reasonably sized ones in what’s either breakfast or lunch, he’s not certain.  The SHIELD director may be one of the last people he wants to see, but he goes anyway, muttering, “I already told you, I don’t want to join your super-secret boy band.”

Fury just laughs, which is somehow more insulting, and all of his suspicions about Rushman (Pepper never lets anyone that far into her inner circle that fast, and he admonishes himself for not paying closer attention) are proven justified as she walks up to the table in her fieldgear.

“You’re… fired,” is all he can come up with.

And then Fury’s shoving the last few weeks in his face, targeting the whole “giving away your possessions” thing the way he’d been glad Pepper hadn’t.  Then Rushman—no, Romanov—leaves the table and comes back to stab him with a hypodermic.

As the lines recede from Tony’s neck like it’s a magic trick, Fury leans forward and says, “Doesn’t look like it’s going to be an easy fix.”

Hovering on the tip of Tony’s tongue is a sharp, “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”  But he bites it back and says instead, “Trust me, I know; I’m good at this stuff.  I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement for palladium.  I’ve tried every combination—every _per_ mutation—of every known element.”

Without so much as blinking, Fury informs him, “Well, I’m here to tell you you haven’t tried them all.”

It’s one of the rare moments in which Tony Stark is rendered speechless, and he stares hard at Fury, feeling the anger rising in his chest.  “All this time,” he grates out, “you’ve known and you’ve had this, and you never bothered to _tell_ me?”  He knows he won’t get either one of them riled, but he says it anyway, a Great Dane facing off against a Mastiff and a Greyhound.

\----------

 _11 - 12 May 2010_ ; _Malibu, California_

He turns out to be right, because essentially the next thing that happens is Fury placing him under house arrest, dumping a metric fuckton of Howard’s old SHIELD files in his living room amidst the party debris, and telling him of the legacy Howard predicted. It shouldn’t still come as a surprise that someone else knows Howard Stark better than his own son, but it does.

When Fury looks at him and asks, “What do you remember about your dad?”, something must break, because the answer he gives is honest.

“He was cold, he was calculating, he never told me he loved me, he never even told me he _liked_ me,” he says tiredly, and he hates that he sounds like a hurt five-year-old. “So it’s a little tough for me to digest when you’re telling me he said the whole future was riding on me and he’s passing it down.  I don’t _get_ that.”  He slumps back in his chair.  “We’re talking about a guy whose happiest day was when he shipped me off to boarding school.” Something else he hadn’t meant to say.

Then he’s informed that he’s basically in lockdown as Fury disappears, and Coulson, who’s left as his babysitter or bodyguard or handler, looks no happier with the arrangement than Tony himself.  He _does_ seem a little too pleased by the idea of tasing Tony, but he does his job like the agent’s agent he is, and Tony keeps baiting him because he can.

Then he steels himself— _get over yourself, cowboy_ —refusing to be intimidated by papers and microfiche and blueprints and recordings.  In that time, he learns more about his father than he ever had when Howard was alive.  The scene is all too familiar, seeing his seven-year-old self being chased out of the room, but then his father’s saying his name and he actually jumps, fooled by the sudden tonal shift into believing for a split second that Howard’s literally in the room.

The man who had said perhaps a handful of kind things to Tony in his lifetime looks straight at the camera and says, “What is and always will be my greatest creation, is you.”

Something that isn’t the arc reactor tightens in his chest, bubbles up in his throat like those baking soda volcanoes every single first-grade science class in history ever demonstrated.  He doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream or cry or throw the entire collection over the balcony into the ocean.  Doing all four is more tempting than it likely should be, but he’s also afraid it’ll bleed straight into hysteria and never stop; he’s fairly certain even Coulson and his taser wouldn’t be enough.

Except then the epiphany hits him like a punch in the gut, and he does what he’s always been good at: he siphons his emotions off behind a psychological firewall and throws himself into his work.  He performs some unanticipated renovations to the house (it’s already half-destroyed, so why the hell not), complete with building an entire bloody particle accelerator in his workshop as though it’s something he does every day.  He should probably be concerned with the levels of radiation he’ll end up exposing himself to once he starts it up, but then again, he’s already dying; it can’t get that much worse.

By the time Coulson reaches his workshop and pulls the door open, he’s significantly saner and actually starting to like the agent in spite of himself.

“I heard you broke the perimeter,” the agent says, and Tony looks over at him briefly before going back to assembly.

“Yeah, that was like three years ago, where you been?”

“I was doing some stuff.”

“Yeah, well, me too, and it worked,” Tony responds, returning vague with vague (he can play that game, too).  “Hey, I’m playing for the home team, Coulson,” he points out as he sets a level down, “you and all your fabulous furry freak brothers.  Are you going to let me work or break my balls?”

Finally Coulson says, “I’ve been reassigned.  Director Fury wants me in New Mexico.”

“Fantastic,” he replies, calculatedly indifferent even though they both know better. “Land of Enchantment.”

“So I’m told.” Before he leaves, Coulson reaches over and grips Tony’s hand.  “We need you.”

“Yeah.  More than you know.”

“Not that much.” And it’s Coulson’s turn to do the flip, dismissive thing.

Not until he’s dismantling the machine later does he realise he’d had his father’s old prototype of Captain America’s shield used as a level.  He finds it ironic.

All the same, the payout is a brand new element and the closest thing he can devise that resembles a safe alternative.  “Congratulations,” JARVIS tells him, “you have created a new element.”

The reactor accepts its new core, and Tony waits long enough for JARVIS to verify that the thing isn’t going to explode before he clips it into place.  “We are unclear as to—” JARVIS protests, but Tony ignores him: again, already dying.  Then he’s tasting coconut and metal (and really, what the fuck?) and watching the reactor in his chest brighten until it could be a search beacon, but the next time he checks his palladium levels, they’re clear, and he stares at the numbers like they’re going to change in front of his eyes.  It’s May, and he’s been living under the looming spectre of death for over two months.

Even then, once he has a solution, he doesn’t get around to telling Pepper, though in all fairness he’ll blame that one on Vanko and his Whiplash armour and Justin freaking Hammer and more homicide attempts.  He definitely _hadn’t_ planned on accidentally telling her via three-way-calling in an offhand reference to Romanov—just because he really, _really_ fails at cooking doesn’t mean he hadn’t intended to make her what would invariably turn out to be another very terrible omelette and tell her the truth.

He’s fairly certain that if he ever tries to make her an omelette again, she’s going to immediately assume it precedes an announcement of his impending death, but he points out weakly, “We could have been in Venice!”

If she were there, she’d quite likely kill him herself, but he’s alive for her to shout at, so she forgives him.  He tells himself he should have trusted her, because despite whatever this is between them, he still hadn’t thought she’d care quite this much.

It’s comforting.

It’s also terrifying.

\----------

 _14 May 2010_ ; _location: classified_

“At this juncture, we’d only like to use you as a consultant.”

He is not a team player, hasn’t been since he was a child; it’s hard to tell whether necessity or choice came first, or if they were a simultaneous manifestation.  So when Fury hands down the verdict on his status in the Avenger’s Initiative, he isn’t surprised, anymore than he had been when Congress had tried to appropriate his suit for their own purposes. Oh, he argues, certainly, but that’s mostly for sake of appearances.

The consultant offer is a midline: it keeps the Stark name involved in SHIELD, but it gives them the right to keep him out of the proverbial loop with the task force.  He thinks it’s cute that they still believe they can keep him out of the system if he really wants the information, but he doesn’t bother opening that Pandora’s box: he’s stood back from SHIELD after Fury’s appointment and let the agency run itself by choice, not necessity.

Therefore, he shakes Fury’s hand, smiles, and says, “You can’t afford me.”  (It’s true: they can’t.)  He starts to leave, then turns back to add, “Then again, I will waive my customary retainer in exchange for a… small favour.”

The look on Stern’s face when he has to go through the awards ceremony is worth it.

He is who—and what—he is, and he’s long since stopped trying to be anything else.  Afghanistan taught him some hard lessons, like the teacher who whacks your knuckles with a ruler, only exponentially amplified, but he likes to think he’s learnt something.  He’s effectively privatised world peace, and while there are still two wars being fought, their people are no longer dying at the business end of weapons bearing his name.  The skies are his, insomuch as they belong to anyone, and he refuses to let them take that from him.  He’s more than a little convinced that, the next time he’s called before Congress or anyone else, singing the theme from _Firefly_ would be more effective than any other argument he could make.

Icarus he may be, on wings of steel (iron; gold-titanium alloy) instead of wax and just as destined to fall, but fall though he may, it’ll be on his terms and no one else’s.

\----------

 _24 April 2012_ ; _Manhattan, New York_

Tony Stark’s relationship with Captain America is complicated.

Like every boy—child, really—in America, he worshipped the American hero, wished he could be Steve Rogers when he grew up.  Captain America was the first real superhero, and Tony had his poster up in his bedroom until he left for university (granted, he was fifteen when he did that, but the point stands).  He’d kept up with the comics since he was a kid, in part because Howard had them and Tony had a tendency to hide in the library when he wasn’t building things in his room, but there was something special about reading them after hearing Howard and Peggy’s stories of the real person.

On the flipside, he has the unique experience of living in Captain America’s almost literal shadow. When your father constantly talks about how perfect someone else is and how you will never measure up, it’s a little hard not to hate the person under discussion.

When Nick Fury calls, Tony’s got a screwdriver in his teeth, a wrench in his hand, and is elbow-deep in the engine of his newest Audi.  Why not, right?

“Director Fury for you, sir,” JARVIS says over the music, and Tony gestures to lower the volume before he spits the screwdriver out and tells JARVIS to put the director through.

“What now?” he calls by way of greeting, but rather than Nick’s usual bluntness, he gets a weighty pause. Propping his forearm against the edge of the grille, he looks up and over his shoulder at the video feed. “Okay, I thought you might have been doing semaphore, but if you are you’re doing it wrong. Who died?”

“The opposite, actually,” comes the unexpected answer.  “An expedition team found Captain Rogers.”

Turning back to the engine, Tony responds, “And?  The only Captain Rogers I know of is dead, so unless you magically found Captain America, I’m not sure why you’re calling _me_.”

Fury pauses. “I _did_ mean Captain America.”

Tony straightens so fast he smashes the top of his head against the hood of the car, almost knocking it off the stand and dropping it on top of himself.  “You’re hilarious,” he says when he’s done making sure he’s not going to crush himself against the engine block.

“Yes, indeed I am,” Fury agrees with a completely straight face.  “I’m also serious.  SHIELD dispatched a team after we got the call, and I just received their confirmation.”

“By way of what, the DNA we don’t have?”

“Actually, we do, but that’s beyond the point.”  Since Tony already knows where that’s going, he doesn’t bother asking. “They found the shield. It’s rather distinctive.”

Muttering under his breath, Tony glares halfheartedly at the feed.  “No, really?  I saw thirteen of them just yesterday.”

With that long-suffering how-is-this-my-life expression, Fury sighs and moves on like Tony never spoke.  “Given that this is still based on your father’s search, I thought you should be aware of the results.  They’re medevacing Rogers to SHIELD Manhattan at the moment.”  And he hangs up before Tony can issue a response.

Bracing his palms against the edge of the car, Tony drops his chin to his chest and grumbles, “You have _got_ to be kidding me.”  He’s equal parts thrilled, disbelieving, wishing he’d never taken that phone call, and absurdly trying to find a fourth reaction so he doesn’t end up splitting his brain into thirds.  (On that last, at least, he’s unsuccessful.)

\----------

 _4 May 2012_ ; _Manhattan, New York_

“Big man in a suit of armour,” Steve Rogers says derisively in approximately their fourth encounter. Or third, since fighting Norse gods in the middle of a forest probably kind of doesn’t count. He’s pressing into Tony’s personal space, putting them eye to eye like he’s determined not to let Tony avoid him.  “Take that off, what are you?”

“Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,” is the flip answer, as it has been so often before. His childhood hero resonates entirely too closely with every other insult ever thrown in Tony’s direction, but he doesn’t blink, just glances away with the dismissive air of someone who can’t be bothered to have a reaction.

He’s always had a great poker face.  (Vegas is torn between hating him because of it, and loving him because he spends obscene amounts of money every time he’s there.)

“I know guys with none of that worth ten of you.”  That Steve doesn’t bother raising his voice somehow makes the insult hit harder, and suddenly he sounds too much like Howard and Tony doesn’t know whether to punch him (and possibly break his own hand in the process) or walk out. “I’ve seen the footage. The only thing you really fight for is yourself.  You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on the wire and let the other guy crawl over you.”

 _You don’t know me_ , Tony thinks, except that train of thought leads straight back to Afghanistan and the fact that he’s the only survivor of that mess.  _We should be bonding over survivor’s guilt_ , comes the halfway hysterical thought, but he swallows it down and says, tonelessly, “I think I would just cut the wire,” all the while wishing he had his gauntlets to wipe that smug _I knew it_ look off Captain America’s patriotic face.

“Always a way out. You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.”

“A hero?  Like you?” Tony shoots back, deflecting now since Rogers sounds like the voice in the back of his head.  He hits back, hard, because he’s read the files and knows exactly which buttons to push: “You’re a laboratory experiment, Rogers—everything special about you came out of a _bottle_.”

Three minutes and fifty-two collective insults later, the Helicarrier is exploding, Banner and Romanov are falling through the floor, glass is shattering everywhere as the air turns into smoke and dust and heat and fire, and he and Rogers are on the ground staring at each other.  “Put on the suit,” the soldier suggests breathlessly, like they hadn’t just been at one another’s throats and the same thought hadn’t occurred to Tony the millisecond everything began breaking apart.

“Yeah,” is all he says as they scramble up off the floor, each dragging the other up with him, and then they’re wrapped up trying to keep the Helicarrier in the air.

When they’re steadily afloat again—borderline dead in the metaphorical water, but afloat—and he’s standing there staring at the bloodstain on the wall, Rogers approaches in his peripheral vision, quiet, sombre, calling Coulson a good man. Then he asks, as Tony makes to leave, “Is this the first time you’ve lost a soldier?”

“We are _not_ soldiers!” Tony snaps, spinning sharply back to put them face to face, and he knows it’s not entirely a fair reaction.  But all he can think of is the dead kids in that convoy in Afghanistan, about Yinsen, about terrorists using weapons with his name painted on them, and Rogers might be a soldier, but Tony doesn’t think he’s earnt that right.

The _deus ex machina_ revelation strikes before they can either make peace or kill each other, at which point their time is consumed by avoiding the aliens and closing the hole in the sky and not getting crushed by giant space whales, never mind dealing with the nuke heading toward the middle of bloody fucking Manhattan. They—all of them—fight like they’ve been a team for years, not minutes, seamless and instinctual as though they hadn’t all been just as happy to kill one another as work together. What Captain America and Iron Man, never mind Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, think of each other goes on the back burner; they can hate each other later if they survive.

\----------

Tony pulls a Jonah with a space whale, which isn’t a phrase he’d ever have thought would be within the realm of possibility.  He and JARVIS literally blow the thing apart from the inside—“I wouldn’t exactly call him a role model,” JARVIS cautions, like they have other options—and if that never happens again it’ll be too soon.

Tony goes up against a Norse god who says, “How will your friends have time for me when they’re so busy fighting you?”

For a moment Tony believes he’s going to end up with glowing blue eyes and a burning urge to blow up everyone he knows, until the melodramatic line is succeeded by a thoroughly anticlimactic nothing.  Now that the arc reactor is done killing him, he hadn’t expected it to save him anymore than it already has (is), but the whole glowstick of destiny bit doesn’t appear to mesh with reactor technology.  There’s a paper in there somewhere, even though no one without a Top Secret security clearance encompassing Sensitive Compartmentalized Information will ever read it.

Even Loki looks confused, his face mirroring what Tony’s thinking.  “This usually works,” he says, tapping the sceptre against the reactor again, and Tony can’t help himself.

“Oh, performance issues, you know, not _un_ common.  One out of five—” he cracks, and Loki pitches him across the room. And then through the window (to date, defenestration has never been in his lived experience). He’s shouting, “Deploy!!” at JARVIS as he flies through shattering glass (and the air), and then thanking god and JARVIS and his own brain as the half-tested Mark 7 wraps around him. With maybe seconds to spare, he fires the repulsors just before he ends up killing a couple of civilians by virtue of splattering himself across the pavement.  Granted, he might come a little too close to accidentally setting them on fire, but he avoids that, too.

Tony hauls a nuke onto his back and sends himself on a one-way trip into space, thinking it really should have occurred to him to design a space-worthy suit before this. JARVIS asks if he should dial Pepper, and Tony’s torn between “god yes” and “fuck no”; mercifully, it’s the former that actually gets articulated.  But she never answers, and JARVIS’ voice is the last thing he hears before the armour’s power fails, the blinding light of exploding ships the last thing he sees before he loses consciousness.

\----------

 _June 2012 - December 2012_ ; _Manhattan, New York -_ _Malibu, California_

After that, space is all he sees whenever he closes his eyes.  After Afghanistan, it was nightmares about drowning, about being carved open alive, but back then there was no one in his bed to wake up—or, at least, no one who mattered.  Now it’s empty space and a cessation of gravity and a slow, torturous suffocation.

He thinks it’ll get better on its own.  He’s wrong. It starts happening in broad daylight, in the middle of conversations, innocuous things and words like “aliens” and “Manhattan” clamping around his chest like a vice as adrenaline floods his body and he thinks he’s either having a heart attack or going to faint. Or both.  Both is definitely a possibility.

Returning to the suit as refuge is, to him, perfectly logical.  We return to what we know, and the only way he doesn’t know the suit better than the back of his hand is if he’s dead.  Because of the suit, he’s not.  It’s a strange, vicious cycle.

Nonetheless, he goes back to the reliable comfort of his creation, as if under the influence of a magnetic pull.  (There’s a tasteless joke in there about the reactor and the suit and actual magnets that Pepper would smack him for if he ever actually spoke it aloud.)  He recognises in the back of his mind something that expands, builds until it teeters on the brink of obsession. But it has saved him, innumerable times; it continues to save him, keeping him airborne; it’s JARVIS, always JARVIS, steady and constant and quietly monitoring his health to offer him some measure of peace of mind.

He designs, and designs, and designs, develops more and more ways to make it increasingly available to him.  One—more than one—is built to withstand extended submersion in water; he has no desire whatsoever to experience drowning again, and while he doesn’t know for certain if the suits will hold under the pressure beyond scuba-diving levels, the specs say they should.  Others are designed for space, because he will not be making that mistake again; he considers developing them for NASA, so they never again risk losing an astronaut in space because of a faulty tether, but he’s still wary about placing this tech in other people’s hands, and NASA is still the US military and under Congressional oversight.  Still others are crazy contingency plans, built to withstand an attack by, say, the Hulk, or a blow from Mjölnir; he doubts either of those things are going to happen anytime soon, but given their track record, it’s not an unreasonable assumption that they’ll run into some alien or other with commensurate strength. Then again, they’ve already encountered mind control and psychics, so maybe the contingencies are a little less crazy.

Amidst the frenzy, he comes upon the idea of prehensile tech, because what better way to ensure the armour’s accessibility than to literally be able to summon it with a twitch of his wrist?

“I’ve also prepared a safety briefing for you to entirely ignore,” JARVIS informs him as he self-implants the series of subdermal microrepeaters and wipes away the blood.

“Which I will,” he replies, not bothering to deny it.  “I’m pleased to announce the imminent arrival of your bouncing, badass baby brother,” he adds to an empty room a beat later.  One of the benefits of having a talking AI and robots that respond to voice commands is, admittedly, not being institutionalised for talking to yourself, since you can say you _weren’t_ talking to yourself and have some credibility leftover.

He isn’t oblivious. He registers the worry in the lines around Pepper’s eyes, in the sidelong glances Rhodey shoots him when he thinks Tony isn’t looking, even in Happy’s overly cautious normalcy. He doesn’t know how to explain this, so he doesn’t try, because to try will be to fail, and he knows there is safety in what he’s doing.  For all the broken glass and flying metal and near-brainings that occur during that first test, the sensation of the suit wrapping itself around him when he beckons is like donning a comfortable old sweatshirt, with bonus armour built into it.

He’s self-aware enough to recognise Pepper is the best thing to ever happen to him. She’s everything he’s not: sane (with the singular exception of getting involved with him), levelheaded, professional, patient.  But even her patience has limits, and he knows he’s driving her away even as he doesn’t know how to stop.

“I’m a piping hot mess,” he admits quietly, right before the worst Christmas in the history of ever. “It’s been going on for a while, I haven’t said anything.  Nothing’s been the same since New York.”

She’s distinctly unimpressed by that—“Oh, really?  I—I hadn’t noticed that at all,” is all she says—but it gets her back in the workshop, and he considers that an improvement.

“You experience things, and then they’re over and you still can’t explain them.  Gods, aliens, other dimensions?  I’m just a—a man in a can.”  There’s a hint of supplication in his voice, a _please understand_ coupled with _please don’t give up on me_ that he hates.  But this is Pepper, who’s seen him in far worse situations.  “The only reason I haven’t cracked up is probably because you moved in.”  He avoids feelings like antelope avoid cheetahs, more than a little convinced Feelings will actually eat him alive, but he’s trying to explain enough to convince her to stay, even though he’s fair certain he’s already cracked up more than a little.

She says nothing, watching him with those blue eyes he loves, and the resigned sympathy hurts. “I can’t sleep,” he tells her, _for the love of god shut_ up _already_ screaming in the back of his head.  “You go to bed, I come down here.  I do what I know, I tinker. Threat is… imminent, and I have to protect the one thing I can’t live without.”  In case it wasn’t obvious, he gestures at her for good measure.  It works, for a few hours, stabilises them both.

Then he closes his eyes and dreams of space, and the agitation is a threat response that summons the Mark 42. Pepper is the only other life sign in the room; the suit’s programming reads her as the threat; and regret dams up in his throat as she walks away and he searches for words that will never be sufficient.

But even that is not enough to stop him, not then.

Some might call him paranoid, but he’s stopped trusting that the need won’t arise, is all too aware safety is an illusion that will not hold up to light and scrutiny. 

\---------- 

 _11 November 2013_ ; _Fairfax, Virginia_

“Iron Man, on your left!” Steve shouts over the comms as he flips himself over the hood of a car.

“Got ‘em,” Tony replies.

In his ear, JARVIS says, “There seems to be a vulnerable spot in the armour, at the base of the throat.”

“That’s idiotic,” Tony mutters.  “Why not just write ‘shoot here’?”

From the sidewalk, halfway behind a fire hydrant and the wheel well of a pickup truck the colour of orange traffic cones, Bucky Barnes fires a rifle from under the vehicle and points out, “They’re handing you a weakness, would you take it already!?”

“They missed the White House. And the Capitol Building. Which are three minutes away,” Steve interrupts, tone dry even over the comms.  “You can _see them_ from here.  Pretty sure intelligence is a moot point.” And his shield goes slamming into the throat of one of their quasi-robotic-humanoid things trying to kill them.

“Guess we need bigger road signs,” Tony answers, blowing up one of them with two hits from his repulsors, and glances skyward.  “Hawkeye!”

He doesn’t even have to finish his sentence before Clint Barton’s raining incendiary arrows down on a quintet approaching from the south.  “These do fire really nicely,” he says by way of acknowledgement. At some indeterminable point after the team had come back together post-Manhattan, it had become SOP for him and Clint to comment at least once on whatever new arrowheads Tony had designed since the last battle.

“I’ll add more accelerant next time,” Tony says, rolling smoothly out of the path of a bullet and sending one right back at his shooter.

Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, Natasha Romanov drops on top of one of the attackers, surprise and leverage taking it to the ground as she breaks its neck. The Hulk follows a moment later, effectively crushing five more and putting a significantly bigger dent in the pavement.

“Welcome to the party,” Clint drawls.  The only team member they’re missing is Thor, who’s off… somewhere.  Doing something.  Where and what aren’t entirely clear, but it’s got something to do with the mythological equivalent of a broken wormhole and maybe some relatives of the Chitauri.  Less homicidal, perhaps, but still probably related.

“Hulk, Widow, we’ve got four more at the cross street ahead of you, to the right,” Steve advises, and Natasha’s up and moving before he’s done speaking.

Running like a gymnast on a balance beam, she fires a single, fatal shot before cornering into the next street.  The Hulk doesn’t bother with precaution, just barrels into the approaching group and roars loudly enough to break a few windows when they start shooting at him. Clint fires two more arrows, Tony and Bucky each fire two more shots, Steve sends his shield in an arc that takes out three attackers at once, and then they’re done.  There’s a surprisingly minimal amount of damage, too, just body-shaped objects sparking with electricity instead of streets ripped apart and buildings on the brink of collapse.

“Nice job, people,” Phil Coulson says over the comms.  “Clean-up crew headed your way, ETA three minutes.”

“Not so bad yourself, Agent,” Steve responds.  Phil’s been back from the fake-dead since February (“happy Valentine’s Day, Hawkeye,” exactly nobody had had the bad taste to say), resuming his place as their handler while simultaneously heading up his other team.  Having him there had stopped being weird after about ten minutes; appreciating that he’s there hasn’t stopped yet.

Picking up a spare piece of armour from the hood of a parked Toyota, Steve underhands it to Tony, who reaches out to catch it without having once looked in Steve’s direction. “Figured you’d want that.”

“And it isn’t even my birthday!”  Tony flips up his faceplate and grins; Steve just rolls his eyes.

“Like that ever stopped you?” the soldier asks, and Bucky sighs dramatically.

As he crosses the street heading toward them, he points and says, “You two are like teenage girls, I swear.”

“Shut up, Buck,” Steve answers cheerfully.

Rifling through broken pieces of armour and weaponry, Tony doesn’t take the time to look up but says, “You _really_ need to stop listening to Katy Perry, Barnes.  It’s starting to show.”

Bucky flips him off with a broad grin, and Natasha trades a look with Clint.  “You guys should do stand-up,” she informs them like they’d asked for the time.

“What, the Three-Man Train Wreck?” Clint replies.

“I’m more of a one-man explosion kinda guy,” Tony answers, and then the clean-up crew is there.

SHIELD takes the bodies, though calling them that is generous, and joins them in sifting through broken glass and some concrete and PVC for evidence.  By now they have a system: samples go to SHIELD labs and directly to Tony himself for analysis, where he and Bruce and Betty Ross and Jane Foster run test after test and add the pieces to the databases. For all that he calls it magic and they call it science, Thor gives them more than his share of epiphanies, when exhibit A turns out to bear a striking resemblance to that thing on that other planet, and so on.  Bucky’s also proven surprisingly useful in the process, having been sent after most of the designers at one point or another on behalf of the Russians. So, for that matter, has Steve; not that he’s been under orders by the Russians, but he’s picked up information the way a black hole takes in everything around it.  Every scientist with a Ph.D. is mildly disgruntled that they spent however many years earning letters after their names for that same information, while Captain freaking America just stands there and absorbs it like a sponge, but it’s not like they’ve got a plethora of resources at their fingers, so they’ll take what they can get.

Within two hours, their team’s part in the aftermath is done.  Steve checks in with Phil as Clint powers up the engines on the Quinjet and Natasha takes her usual place shotgun. Dropping into one of the seats along the wall, Tony pulls his helmet off and sets it down next to him; across the aisle, Bucky’s seated beside a de-Hulked Bruce Banner who’s already half asleep.

“Is that your rifle, or did you decide to switch it up with a baseball bat?” Tony asks with a frown and a puzzled head-tilt.

Bucky flips it around, offering it to Tony grip-first.  “Those things were stronger than they looked.”  He nods at the decidedly squashed muzzle.  “One of them did that with a hand.” Then he frowns. “ _Is_ it a hand?”

“Hand, arm, robotic extension, whatever.  We’ll develop a dictionary later,” Tony replies absently, checking the chamber out of habit before he leans in closer to examine the front half of the rifle. A few moments later, he glances back up.  “That’s at least 250 in power grip strength,” he says, then adds, “ ‘normal’ for men averages out around a hundred.  Unless their names happen to be yours, Clint, or Steve, and none of you are normal.”

“Hey now,” all three of them answer in stereo as Steve steps into the jet and hits the control panel to close the rear hatch.

“What?  That was totally a compliment!” Tony protests. “Though give me a second and I’ll turn it into a really good insult.”

“You’ve been awake too long if you need a second to do that.”  Steve pushes back his cowl and settles in beside Tony, one arm half across the back of Tony’s seat and half across his shoulders.

Leaning back against him, Tony just sniffs and grumbles, “We just got attacked by the freaking Cybermen. I’m making it up as I go along.”

“Smart man,” Bruce mumbles drily.  “I’d call you a genius except I’m in the room.  On the plane.”  He opens his eyes. “Damn.”

Clint’s the first one to crack, trying to swallow the laugh and ultimately sounding like he’s choking. Steve’s next, the traitor, which sets off Bucky, then Natasha and Bruce, and Tony’s left grousing, “I should have known it was a mistake to introduce to you to _Doctor Who_ ”, which, it turns out, is difficult to say when he’s trying not to laugh and failing.

At some nebulous point in time, in some amorphous manner, Tony Stark became part of a team, _this_ team. They’re all out of time, out of place, known for what they are instead of who they are and drawn together in spite of (because of?) being literally thrown together at the start.

Now it isn’t just Pepper badgering him into eating, into sleeping—he and Pepper had split back in May, resumed their old friendship somewhere around July, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the team kept him sane(r) than he would have been. It isn’t just JARVIS in his ear or looking out for him or forcing him out of his own workshop. Taking meals as a group becomes normal; Steve or Bruce in his lab becomes normal; throwing barbs back and forth at Bucky and Clint during movie night becomes normal; sparring with Natasha and Phil becomes normal; pop culture lessons to Thor and Steve become normal.

And these days, when he takes to the skies, he isn’t doing the Lone Gunslinger act anymore with no one but JARVIS to help.  He has a team at his back, and he has theirs.

It’s new. It’s strange.  It’s surreal.

It’s something he could get used to.

 

_Finis._

_Feedback is always appreciated._


	2. Notes on an Origin Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on canon, exceptions to said canon, merging of canon, and scientific and medical trivia.
> 
> Seriously, you do not need to read this to understand the fic, it's just the kind of cataloguing you get when a Lit major writes fic in a universe this enormous.

Canon is based largely in 616, but because Tony’s storyline is the most changed by MCU and modern technology, I’ve retained a lot of his background (e.g. he acquires the arc reactor due to Afghanistan, post-Jericho-demonstration, not in Vietnam or Gulf-War-era-Afghanistan demonstrating AWEs).  Because this piece is almost entirely Tony-centric, the canon discrepancies are less of an issue, but here’s clarification.

Most of the dates used have been taken from the [MCU timeline](http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/5395/A-Marvel-Cinematic-Universe-Timeline), due to the time displacement put into play by the first _Iron Man_ film (which is to say, in comparison to the comics).

Exceptions:

  * Maria & Howard’s death: 616 says they passed away in a plane crash when Tony was 21; MCU says they were killed in a car crash when he was either 17 or 21.  I’ve gone with 21, but the TL lists their date of death as 16 Dec. 1991, which would put Tony at 20.  So I’ve moved it up a year to 1992.
  * Afghanistan’s press conference: the TL places Tony’s escape from Afghanistan on 20 August, his homecoming press conference on the 21st.  Given where he was found, the circumstances in which he was found/behind his kidnapping, his injuries, and what I know of military SOP, I have a very hard time believing he was not remanded to medical.  Ramstein is the closest AFB (chosen because Rhodey’s USAF*), from which wounded soldiers are sent to Landstuhl, and though Tony himself is not military, he was there as a contractor and three months in captivity followed by a few hours wandering the desert isn’t something they’d laugh off no matter how much he protested.  To be fair, the TL does state that he goes to Landstuhl, but it also includes debriefings with the US government alphabet soup, so even with the 11.5 hour time difference between Afghanistan (Kabul) and California, I don’t think he could have realistically been back Stateside the day after.
  * The events of the _The Avengers_ : the MCU TL has that set in 2011; I set it in 2012 (based on the film’s release date) for the fic that this one is technically part of, so for the sake of what remains of my own sanity, I’ve retained the 2012 setting.
  * The date of Steve being unburied: see above; the TL places it as April 2011, but since a years’ worth of adjustment between thawing and being attacked by aliens would probably have resulted in a little less “WTF pop culture?”, I’ve pushed this, too, up a year to 2012.
  * Peggy Carter**.  Her role as Agent 13, her capture by the Gestapo, and her subsequent amnesia were never covered in the first _Captain America_ film, and this, like the _Iron Man_ modifications, requires too much rewriting of MCU to stay with 616—Cap’s been revived in the twenty-first century, not in 1963, so he can’t exactly save her from Doctor Faustus, and on and on.  




616 canon states that Tony has three PhDs (Physics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering) and two Master’s (Physics and Engineering), but MCU never acknowledges anything beyond his _summa cum laude_ undergraduate MIT graduation at 17 (current recommended course load is 4-5 courses a semester; because I am terrible at maths and assume pre-reqs and other requirements have changed in the intervening decades, please do me a favour and don’t overthink the numbers on his courses).  Because 616 never specifies where he attends graduate school, I basically googled the top schools in the late 1980s/early 1990s for those three programs; MIT was the result, so as far as my [head]canon is concerned, he spent a while in Cambridge.  (Stanford was the other option, and I wasn’t sure he’d have gone to CA for grad school, so, well.)  The same applies to the journals mentioned: they are real journals, chosen based on searches for top-tier engineering or physics journals in the 1990s.

And, in case it needed stating, Tony skips the homeless derelict part of 616.  It’s also never mentioned if he has a pilot’s licence or not; that’s entirely my invention.

From a physical standpoint***, details are related to 616, so Tony isn’t short (compared to the rest of the team), and for some reason almost everyone is a blue-eyed brunet(te) unless they’re a blue-eyed blond(e).  Go, stereotypes?  Peggy is the exception to this, since in 616 she’s blonde, but Hayley Atwell portrays the character so smoothly that I couldn’t help but keep her a brunette.

Regarding the soldiers killed in the post-Jericho-demonstration ambush, their names are never given, with the exception of the Airman in the backseat with Tony.  For the other two, we were only given their rank (via the insignia on their uniforms) and their gender, so the names are my own, though their actions are not.

All dialogue pre- _Iron Man_ is mine, the 1999 Bern Conference obviously notwithstanding; after that, if you see dialogue and blocking that seems like it’s directly from the film, that’s probably because it is.  Some of it is intentionally out of sequence (e.g. Yinsen and Tony’s exchanges versus the physical events), and some of it’s been manufactured (e.g. Pepper and Coulson’s reactions post-“I am Iron Man”), while a lot of it has simply been supplemented with narrative (e.g. Pepper’s promotion).  Howard’s line to Tony (“Son, your school tests may prove you’re a genius, but you act like an idiot!”) is straight out of _Iron Man_ , Volume 1, Issue 28.

There is, however, an exception to this, as well, and that is Fury’s appearance at the end of _Iron Man_.  Because this piece, as stated, leans heavily toward 616 canon, it establishes that Fury worked with Howard and Peggy to found SHIELD (despite the fact that MCU and the Infinity Serum do not currently exist together, not in any real, applicable sense).  Because it also states that Tony is the one who offered Fury the position of SHIELD Director, I’ve rewritten the dialogue as though Tony already knows who he is and what SHIELD does.

For the scientists and/or science geeks reading for this, _Popular Mechanics_ was asked about the viability of Tony [building a particle accelerator in his workshop](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/iron-man-2-particle-accelerator).  I was mostly amused, hence the link.  I am also aware the prevalence of female professors—much less women of colour—in Tony’s fields of study were rare several decades ago, but that—and the Stephen Hawking reference—I blame entirely on artistic licence and a bit of idealism.

Iris recognition really was developed officially in 1994, so I’ve just reallocated the patent to SI; if memory serves, the company patented no such technology in any iteration of the Marvel Universe.  John Daugman, you have my apologies.

For the medical practitioners and/or medically knowledgeable reading this, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) issues are noted in [_Fatal Frontier_](http://secretlymutants.tumblr.com/post/78302393376/fatal-frontier-1).  None of the medications listed should be taken as medical advice.  I am not a doctor, and though at this point I could probably pass as either a pharmacist, nurse, or both by way of having done my own research for my own medical fuckery, all symptoms and prescriptions were chosen based on personal experience with said medical chaos and the knowledge that sometimes you have no choice except for bad and worse.  In a bit of shameless self-promotion, a more detailed take on the impact of the arc reactor on Tony’s health, as well as the ramifications of the panic attacks portrayed in _Iron Man 3_ can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1888665).

And, last but not least, _Doctor Who_ belongs to a lot of people who aren’t me, and _Firefly_ belongs to Joss Whedon.  If you haven’t heard the theme song for the latter, the opening lyrics are: _take my love, take my land_ / _take me where I cannot stand_ // _I don’t care, I’m still free_ / _you can’t take the sky from me_.

 

 

*Depending on which version of Marvel you look at, Rhodey’s either Army, Marines, or Air Force; I don’t know why MCU decided to pick the Air Force—or why Marvel skipped the Navy and the Coast Guard while they were playing the military lottery—but for sake of simplicity (everyone else here is already USAF), I decided to go with it, because why the hell not.  Between MIT and the [insert military branch here], he also has a degree in aerospace/aviation engineering.

**In 616, Peggy’s still single (and at this point, also relatively recently dead, but that’s beside the point).  Changing her surname to “Jones” is a reference to her relationship with SHIELD Agent Gabe Jones; they do not marry (though they do get captured by Red Skull and tortured, so there’s bonding for you) in comics canon, but given the MCU changes, I liked the idea of her eventually marrying and having a family alongside her career.  (And the plane really does go down in the English Channel in 616, as opposed to off the coast of Greenland in MCU; I swear I did not make that up.)

***Also, I was not under the influence of anything when I listed Jarvis as having served in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  He really did.  He was also born in Brooklyn.  So.


End file.
